Читать книгу Martin Van Buren - Edward Morse Shepard - Страница 8

At this time the system of removing the lesser as well as the greater officers of government for political reasons was well established in New York. It is impossible to realize the nature of Van Buren's political education without understanding this old system of proscription, whose influence upon American public life has been so prodigious. The strife over the Federal Constitution had been fierce. Its friends, after their victory, sought, neither unjustly nor unnaturally, to punish Governor Clinton for his opposition. Although Washington wished to stand neutral between parties, he still believed it politically suicidal to appoint officers not in sympathy with his administration.[1] Hamilton undoubtedly determined the New York appointments when the new government was launched, and they were made from the political enemies of Governor Clinton—a course provoking an animosity which not improbably appeared in the more numerous state appointments controlled by Clinton and the Republican council. After the excesses of the French Revolution the Republicans were denounced as Jacobins and radicals, dangerous in politics and corrupt in morals. The family feuds aided and exaggerated the divisions in this small community of freehold voters. Appointments were made in the federal and state services for political reasons and for family reasons, precisely as they had long been made in England. Especially along the rich river counties from New York to the upper Hudson were so distributed the lucrative offices, which were eagerly sought for their profit as well as for their honor.

The contests were at first for places naturally vacated by death or resignation; the idea of the property right of an incumbent actually in office lingered until after the last century was out. It is not clear when the first removals of subordinate officers took place for political reasons. Some were made by the Federalists during Governor Jay's administration; but the first extensive removals seem to have occurred after the elections of 1801. For this there were two immediate causes. In that year the exclusive nominating power of the governor was taken from him. Each of the other four members of the council of appointment could now nominate as well as confirm. Appointments and removals were made, therefore, from that year until the new Constitution of 1821, by one of the worst of appointing bodies, a commission of several men whose consultations were secret and whose responsibility was divided. Systematic abuse of the power of appointment became inevitable. There was, besides, a second reason in the anger against Federalists, which they had gone far to provoke, and against their long and by no means gentle domination. This anger induced the Republicans to seek out every method of punishment. But for this, the abuse might have been long deferred. Nor is it unlikely that the refusal of Jefferson, inaugurated in March of that year, to make a "clean sweep" of his enemies, turned the longing eyes of embittered Republicans in New York more eagerly to the fat state offices enjoyed by their insolent adversaries of the past twelve years.

The Clintons and Livingstons had led the Republicans to a victory at the state election in April, 1801. Later in that year George Clinton, now again governor, called together the new council with the nominating power vested in every one of its five members. This council acted under distinguished auspices, and it deserves to be long remembered. Governor Clinton presided, and his famous nephew, De Witt Clinton, was below him in the board. The latter represented the Clintonian Republicans.[2] Ambrose Spencer, a man of great parts and destined to a notable career, represented the Livingstons, of whom he was a family connection. Roseboom, the other Republican, was easily led by his two abler party associates. The fifth member did not count, for he was a Federalist. Two of the three really distinguished men of this council, De Witt Clinton and Ambrose Spencer, it is not unjust to say, first openly and responsibly established in New York the "spoils system" by removals, for political reasons, of officers not political. The term of office of the four senatorial members of this council had commenced while the illustrious Federalist John Jay was governor; but they rejected his nominations until he was tired of making them, and refused to call them together. When Clinton took the governor's seat, he promptly summoned the board, and in August, 1801, the work began. De Witt Clinton publicly formulated the doctrine, but it did not yet reach its extreme form. He said that the principal executive offices in the State ought to be filled by the friends of the administration, and the more unimportant offices ought to be proportionately distributed between the two parties. The council rapidly divided the chief appointments among the Clintons and Livingstons and their personal supporters. Officers were selected whom Jay had refused to appoint. Edward Livingston, the chancellor's brother, was given the mayoralty of New York, a very profitable as well as important station; Thomas Tillotson, a brother-in-law of Chancellor Livingston, was made secretary of state, in place of Daniel Hale, removed; John V. Henry, a distinguished Federalist lawyer, was removed from the comptrollership; the district attorney, the clerk and the recorder of New York were removed; William Coleman, the founder of the "Evening Post," and a strong adherent of Hamilton, was turned out of the clerkship of the Circuit Court. And so the work went on through minor offices. New commissions were required by the Constitution to be issued to the puisne judges of the county courts and to justices of the peace throughout the State once in three years. Instead of renewing the commissions and preserving continuity in the administration of justice, the council struck out the names of Federalists and inserted those of Republicans. The proceedings of this council of 1801 have profoundly affected the politics of New York to this day. Few political bodies in America have exercised as serious and lasting an influence upon the political habits of the nation. The tradition that Van Buren and the Albany Regency began political proscription is untrue. The system of removals was thus established several years before Van Buren held his first office. Its founders, De Witt Clinton and Ambrose Spencer, were long his political enemies. Governor Clinton, whose honorable record it was that during the eighteen years of his governorship he had never consented to a political removal, entered his protest—not a very hearty one, it is to be feared—in the journal of the council; but in vain. In the next year the two chief offenders were promoted—De Witt Clinton to be United States senator in the place of General Armstrong, a brother-in-law of Chancellor Livingston, and Ambrose Spencer to be attorney-general; and two years later Spencer became a judge of the Supreme Court.

After the removals there began a disintegration of the party hitherto successfully led by Burr, the Clintons, and the Livingstons. Colonel Swartwout, Burr's friend, was called by De Witt Clinton a liar, scoundrel and villain; although, after receiving two bullets from Clinton's pistol in a duel, he was assured by the latter, with the courtesy of our grandfathers, that there was no personal animosity. Burr's friends had of course to be removed. But in 1805, after the Clintons and the Livingstons had united in the election of Lewis as governor over Burr, they too quarreled—and naturally enough, for the offices would not go around. So, after the Clintonians on the meeting of the legislature early in 1806 had captured the council, they turned upon their recent allies. Maturin Livingston was removed from the New York recordership, and Tillotson from his place as secretary of state. The work was now done most thoroughly. Sheriffs, clerks, surrogates, county judges, justices of the peace, had to go. But at the corporation election in New York in the same year, the Livingstonians and Federalists, with a majority of the common council, in their fashion righted the wrong, and, with a vigor not excelled by their successors a half century later, removed at once all the subordinate municipal officers subject to their control who were Clintonians. In 1807 the Livingstonian Republicans, or, as they were now called from the governor, the Lewisites, with the Federalists and Burrites, secured control of the state council; and proceeded promptly to the work of removals, defending it as a legitimate return for the proscriptive course of their predecessors. In 1808 the Clintonians returned to the council, and, through its now familiar labors, to the offices from which the Lewisites were in their turn driven. In 1810 the Federalists controlled the Assembly which chose the council; and they enjoyed a "clean sweep" as keenly as had the contending Republican factions. But the election of this year, the political record tells us, taught a lesson which politicians have ever since refused to learn, perhaps because it has not always been taught. The removal of the Republicans from office "had the natural tendency to call out all their forces." The Clintonians in 1811, therefore, were enabled by the people to reverse the Federalist proscription of 1810. The Federalists, again in power in 1813, again followed the uniform usage then twelve years old. Political removals had become part of the unwritten law.

At this time Van Buren suffered the loss of his office as surrogate, but doubtless without any sense of private or public wrong. It was the customary fate of war. In 1812 he was nominated for state senator from the middle district, composed of Columbia, Dutchess, Orange, Ulster, Delaware, Chenango, Greene, and Sullivan counties, as the candidate of the Clintonian Republicans against Edward P. Livingston, the candidate of the Lewisites or Livingstonians and Burrites as well as the Federalists. Livingston was the sitting member, and a Republican of powerful family and political connections. Van Buren, not yet thirty, defeated him by a majority of less than two hundred out of twenty thousand votes. In November, 1812, he took his seat at Albany, and easily and within a few months reached a conspicuous and powerful place in state politics.

These details of the establishment of the "spoils system" in New York politics seem necessary to be told, that Van Buren's own participation in the wrong may be fairly judged. It is a common historical vice to judge the conduct of men of earlier times by standards which they did not know. Van Buren found thoroughly and universally established at Albany, when he entered its life, the rule that, upon a change in the executive, there should be a change in the offices, without reference to their political functions. He had in his own person experienced its operation both to his advantage and to his disadvantage. Federalists and Republicans were alike committed to the rule. The most distinguished and the most useful men in active public life, whatever their earlier opinion might have been, had acquiesced and joined in the practice. Nor was the practice changed or extended after Van Buren came into state politics. It continued as it had thus begun, until he became a national figure. Success in it required an ability and skill of which he was an easy master; nor does he seem to have shrunk from it. But he was neither more nor less reprehensible than the universal public sense about him. For it must be remembered that the "spoils system" was not then offensive to the more enlightened citizens of New York. The system was no excess of democracy or universal suffrage. It had arisen amidst a suffrage for governor and senators limited to those who held in freehold land worth at least £100, and for assemblymen limited to those who held in freehold land worth £20, or paid a yearly rent of forty shillings, and who were rated and actually paid taxes. It was practiced by men of aristocratic habits chosen by the well-to-do classes. It grew in the disputes of great family interests, and in the bitterness of popular elements met in a new country, still strange or even foreign to one another, and permitted by their release from the dangers of war and the fear of British oppression to indulge their mutual dislikes.

The frequent "rotation" in office which was soon to be pronounced a safeguard of republican institutions, and which Jackson in December, 1829, told Congress was a "leading principle in the Republicans' creed," was by no means an unnatural step towards an improvement of the civil service of the State. Reformers of our day lay great stress upon the fundamental rule of democratic government, that a public office is simply a trust for the people; and they justly find the chief argument against the abuses of patronage in the notorious use of office for the benefit of small portions of the people, to the detriment of the rest. In England, however, for centuries (and to some extent the idea survives there in our own time), there was in an office a quality of property having about it the same kind of sacred immunity which belongs to real or personal estate. There were reversions to offices after the deaths of their occupants, like vested remainders in lands. It was offensive to the ordinary sense of decency and justice that the right of a public officer to appropriate so much of the public revenue should be attacked. It did not offend the public conscience that great perquisites should belong to officers performing work of the most trifling value or none at all. The same practices and traditions, weakened by distance from England and by the simpler life and smaller wealth of the colonists, came to our forefathers. They existed when the democratic movement, stayed during the necessities of war and civil reconstruction, returned at the end of the last century and became all-powerful in 1801. To break this idea of property and right in office, to make it clear that every office was a mere means of service of the people at the wish of the people, there seemed, to very patriotic and generally very wise men, no simpler way than that the people by their elections should take away and distribute offices in utter disregard of the interests of those who held them. The odious result to which this afterwards led, of making offices the mere property of influential politicians, was but imperfectly foreseen. Nor did that result, inevitable as it was, follow for many years. There seems no reason to believe that the incessant and extensive changes in office which began in 1801, seriously lowered the standard of actual public service until years after Van Buren was a powerful and conspicuous politician. Political parties were pretty generally in the hands of honest men. The prostituted and venal disposition of "spoils," though a natural sequence, was to come long after. Rotation was practiced, or its fruits were accepted and enjoyed with satisfaction, by public men of the State who were really statesmen, who had high standards of public honor and duty, whose minds were directed towards great and exalted public ends. If it seemed right to De Witt Clinton, Edward Livingston, Robert R. Livingston, and Ambrose Spencer, surely lesser gods of our early political Olympus could not be expected to refuse its advantages or murmur at its hardships. Nor was the change distasteful to the people, if we may judge by their political behavior. No faction or party seems to have been punished by public sentiment for the practice except in conspicuous cases like those of De Witt Clinton and Van Buren, where sometimes blows aimed at single men roused popular and often an undeserved sympathy. The idea that a public officer should easily and naturally go from the ranks of the people without special equipment, and as easily return to those ranks, has been popularly agreeable wherever the story of Cincinnatus has been told. Early in this century the closeness of offices to ordinary life, and the absence of an organized bureaucracy controlling or patronizing the masses of men, seemed proper elements of the great democratic reform. There had not yet arisen the very modern and utilitarian and the vastly better conception of a service, the responsible directors of whose policy should be changed with popular sentiment, but whose subordinates should be treated by the public as any other employer would treat them, upon simple and unsentimental rules of business. Another practical consideration makes more intelligible the failure of our ancestors to perceive the dangers of the great change they permitted. Offices were not nearly as technical, their duties not nearly as uniform, as they have grown to be in the more complex procedures of our enormously richer and more populous time. Every officer did a multitude of things. Intelligent and active men in unofficial life shifted with amazing readiness and success from one calling to another. A general became a judge, or a judge became a general—as, indeed, we have seen in later days. A merchant could learn to survey; a farmer could keep or could learn to keep fair records.

In the art of making of the lesser offices ammunition with which to fight great battles over great questions, Van Buren became a master. His imperturbable temper and patience, his keen reading of the motives and uses of men, gave him so firm a hold upon politicians that it has been common to forget the undoubted hold he long had upon the people. In April, 1816, he was reëlected senator for a second term of four years. His eight years of service in the senate expired in 1820.

In November, 1812, the first session of the new legislature was held to choose presidential electors. Not until sixteen years later were electors chosen directly by the people. Van Buren voted for the candidates favorable to De Witt Clinton for president as against Madison. In the successful struggle of the Clintonians for these electors, he is said in this, his first session, to have shown the address and activity which at once made him a Republican leader. For his vote against Madison Van Buren's friends afterwards made many apologies; his adversaries declared it unpardonable treachery to one of the revered Democratic fathers. But the young politician was not open to much condemnation. De Witt Clinton, though he had but just reached the beginning of middle life, was a very able and even an illustrious man. He had been unanimously nominated in an orderly way by a caucus of the Republican members of the legislature of 1811 and 1812 of which Van Buren was not a member. He had accepted the nomination and had declined to withdraw from it. There was a strong Republican opposition to the declaration of war at that time, because preparation for it had not been adequately made. Most of the Republican members of Congress from New York had voted against the declaration. The virtues and abilities of Madison were not those likely to make a successful war, as the event amply proved. There was natural and deserved discontent with the treatment by Jefferson's administration, in which Madison had charge of foreign relations, and by Madison's own administration, of the difficulties caused by the British Orders in Council, the Berlin and Milan decrees of Napoleon, and the unprincipled depredations of both the great belligerents. Van Buren is said by Butler, then an inmate of his family, to have been an open and decided advocate of the embargo, and of all the strong measures proposed against Great Britain and of the war itself. Nor was this very inconsistent with his vote for Clinton. He had a stronger sense of allegiance to his party in the State than to his party at Washington; and the Republican party of New York had regularly declared for Clinton. For once at least Van Buren found himself voting with the great body of the Federalists, men who had not, like John Quincy Adams, become reconciled to the strong and obvious, though sometimes ineffective, patriotism of Jefferson's and Madison's administrations. But whatever had been the motives which induced Van Buren to support Clinton, they soon ceased to operate. Within a few months after this the political relations between the two men were dissolved; and they were politically hostile, until Clinton's death fourteen years afterwards called from Van Buren a pathetic tribute.

Although the youngest man but one, it was said, until that time elected to the state senate, Van Buren was in January, 1814, chosen to prepare the answer then customarily made to the speech of the governor. In it he defended the war, which had been bitterly assailed in the address to the governor made by the Federalist Assembly. Political divisions even when carried to excess were, he said, inseparable from the blessings of freedom; but such divisions were unfit in their resistance of a foreign enemy. The great body of the New York Republicans, with Governor Tompkins at their head, now gave Madison vigorous support; although their defection in 1812 had probably made possible the Federalist success at the election for the Assembly in 1813, which embarrassed the national administration. Van Buren warmly supported Tompkins for his reëlection in April, 1813, and prepared for the legislative caucus a highly declamatory, but clear and forcible, address to Republican electors in his behalf. The provocations to war were strongly set out. It was declared that "war and war alone was our only refuge from national degradation;" the "two great and crying grievances" were "the destruction of our commerce, and the impressment of our seamen;" for Americans did not anticipate the surrender at Ghent two years later to the second wrong. While American sailors' "deeds of heroic valor make old Ocean smile at the humiliations of her ancient tyrant," the address urged Americans to mark the man, meaning the trading Federalist, who believed "in commuting our sailors' rights for the safety of our merchants' goods." In the sophomoric and solemn rhetoric of which Americans, and Englishmen too, were then fond, it pointed out that the favor of citizens was not sought "by the seductive wiles and artful blandishments of the corrupt minions of aristocracy," who of course were Federalists, but that citizens were now addressed "in the language which alone becomes freemen to use—the language to which alone it becomes freemen to listen."

In the legislative sessions of 1813 and 1814 Van Buren gave a practical and skillful support to administration measures. But many of them were balked by the Federalists, until in the election of April, 1814, the rising patriotism of the country, undaunted by the unskillful and unfortunate conduct of the war, pronounced definitely in favor of a strong war policy. The Republicans recovered control of the Assembly; and there were already a Republican governor and Senate. An extra session was summoned in September, 1814, through which exceedingly vigorous measures were carried against Federalist opposition. Van Buren now definitely led. Appropriations were made from the state treasury for the pay of militia in the national service. The State undertook to enlist twelve thousand men for two years, a corps of sea fencibles consisting of twenty companies, and two regiments of colored men; slaves enlisting with the consent of their masters to be freed. Van Buren's "classification act" Benton afterwards declared to be the "most energetic war measure ever adopted in this country." By it the whole military population was divided into 12,000 classes, each class to furnish one able-bodied man, making the force of 12,000 to be raised. If no one volunteered from a class, then any member of the class was authorized to procure a soldier by a bounty, the amount of which should be paid by the members of the class according to their ability, to be determined by assessors. If no soldier from the class were thus procured, then a soldier was to be peremptorily drafted from each class. Van Buren was proud enough of this act to file the draft of it in his own handwriting with the clerk of the Senate, indorsed by himself: "The original Classification Bill, to be preserved as a memento of the patriotism, intelligence, and firmness of the legislature of 1814–15. M. V. B. Albany, Feb. 15, 1815."

Cheered, after many disasters, by the victory at Plattsburg and the creditable battle of Lundy's Lane, the Senate, in Van Buren's words, congratulated Governor Tompkins upon "the brilliant achievements of our army and navy during the present campaign, which have pierced the gloom that for a time obscured our political horizon." The end of the war left in high favor the Republicans who had supported it. The people were good-humoredly willing to forget its many inefficiencies, to recall complacently its few glories, and to find little fault with a treaty which, if it established no disputed right, at least brought peace without surrender and without dishonor. Jackson's fine victory at New Orleans after the treaty was signed, though it came too late to strengthen John Quincy Adams's dauntless front in the peace conference, was quickly seized by the people as the summing up of American and British prowess. The Republicans now had a hero in the West, as well as a philosopher at Monticello. Van Buren drafted the resolution giving the thanks of New York "to Major-General Jackson, his gallant officers and troops, for their wonderful and heroic victory."

In the method then well established the Republicans celebrated their political success in 1814. Among the removals, Abraham Van Vechten lost the post of attorney-general, which on February 17, 1815, was conferred upon Van Buren for his brilliant and successful leadership in the Senate. He remained, however, a senator of the State. At thirty-two, therefore, he was, next to the governor, the leader of the Tompkins Republicans, now so completely dominant; he held two political offices of dignity and importance; and he was conducting besides an active law practice.

De Witt Clinton, after his defeat for the presidency, suffered other disasters. It was in January, 1813, that he and Van Buren broke their political relations; and the Republicans very largely fell off from him. The reasons for this do not clearly appear; but were probably Clinton's continuance of hostility to the national administration, which seemed unpatriotic to the Republicans, and some of the mysterious matters of patronage in which Clinton had been long and highly proscriptive. In 1815 the latter was removed from the mayoralty of New York by the influence of Governor Tompkins in the council. He had been both mayor and senator for several years prior to 1812. He was mayor and lieutenant-governor when he was a candidate for the presidency.

In 1816 the Republicans in the Assembly, then closely divided between them and the Federalists (who seemed to be favored by the apportionment), sought one of those immoral advantages whose wrong in times of high party feeling seems invisible to men otherwise honorable. In the town of Pennington a Federalist, Henry Fellows, had been fairly elected to the Assembly by a majority of 30; but 49 of his ballots were returned as reading "Hen. Fellows;" and his Republican competitor, Peter Allen, got the certificate of appointment. The Republicans, acting, it seems, in open conference with Van Buren, insisted not only upon organizing the house, which was perhaps right, but upon what was wrong and far more important. They elected the council of appointment before Fellows was seated, as he afterwards was by an almost unanimous vote. The "Peter Allen legislature" is said to have become a term of reproach. But, as with electoral abuses in later days, the Federalists were not as much aided as they ought to have been by this sharp practice of their rivals; the people perhaps thought that, as they were in the minority everywhere but in the Assembly, they ought not to have been permitted, by a capture of the council, to remove the Republicans in office.

At any rate the election in April, 1816, while the "Peter Allen legislature" was still in office, went heavily in favor of the Republicans, Van Buren receiving his second election to the Senate. On March 4, 1816, he was chosen by the legislature a regent of the University of the State of New York, an office which he held until 1829. The University was then, as now, almost a myth, being supposed to be the associated colleges and academies of the State. But the regents have had a varying charge of educational matters.

In 1817 the agitation, so superbly and with such foresight conducted by De Witt Clinton, resulted in the passage of the law under which the construction of the Erie Canal began. Van Buren's enmity to Clinton did not cause him to oppose the measure, of which Hammond says he was an "early friend." With a few others he left his party ranks to vote with Clinton's friends; and this necessary accession from the "Bucktails" is said by the same fair historian to have been produced by Van Buren's "efficient and able efforts." In his speech favoring it he declared that his vote for the law would be "the most important vote he ever gave in his life;" that "the project, if executed, would raise the State to the highest possible pitch of fame and grandeur," an expression not discredited by the splendid and fruitful result of the enterprise. Clinton, after hearing the speech, forgot for a moment their political collisions, and personally thanked Van Buren.

In April, 1817, Clinton was elected governor by a practically unanimous vote. His resolute courage and the prestige of the canal policy compelled this tribute from the Republicans, in spite of his sacrilegious presidential aspiration in 1812, and his dismissal from the mayoralty of New York in 1815. Governor Tompkins, now vice-president, was Clinton's only peer in New York politics. The popular tide was too strong for the efforts of Tompkins, Van Buren, and their associates. In the eagerness to defeat Clinton, it was even suggested that Tompkins should serve both as governor and vice-president; should be at once ruler at Albany and vice-ruler at Washington. Van Buren did not, however, go with the hot-heads of the legislature in opposing a bill for an election to fill the vacancy left by the resignation, which it was at last thought necessary for Tompkins to make, of the governorship. No one dared run against Clinton; and he triumphantly returned to political power. Under this administration of his, the party feud took definite form. Clinton's Republican adversaries were dubbed "Bucktails" from the ornaments worn on ceremonial occasions by the Tammany men who had long been Clinton's enemies. The Bucktails and their successors were the "regular" Republicans, or the Democrats as they were later called; and they kept their regularity until, long afterwards, the younger and greater Bucktail leader, when venerable and laden with honors, became the titular head of the Barnburner defection. The merits of the feud between Bucktails and Clintonians it is now difficult to find. Each accused the other of coquetting with the Federalists; and the accusation was nearly always true of one or the other of them. Politics was a highly developed and extremely interesting game, whose players, though really able and patriotic men, were apparently careless of the undignified parts they were playing. Nor are Clintonians and Bucktails alone in political history. Cabinets of the greatest nations have, in more modern times, broken on grounds as sheerly personal as those which divided Clinton and Van Buren in 1818. British and French ministries, as recent memoirs and even recent events have shown, have fallen to pieces in feuds of as little essential dignity as belonged to those of New York seventy years ago.

In 1819 the Bucktails suffered the fate of war; and Van Buren, their efficient head, was removed from the attorney-general's office. Thurlow Weed, then a country editor, grotesquely wrote at the time that "rotation in office is the most striking and brilliant feature of excellence in our benign form of government; and that by this doctrine, bottomed, as it is, upon the Magna Charta of our liberties, Van Buren's removal was not only sanctioned, but was absolutely required." The latter still remained state senator, and soon waged a short and decisive campaign to recover political mastery. He now came to the aid of Governor Tompkins, who during the war with England had borrowed money for public use upon his personal responsibility, and in the disbursement of several millions of dollars for war purposes had, through carelessness in bookkeeping or clerical detail, apparently become a debtor of the State. The comptroller, in spite of a law passed in 1819 to indemnify Tompkins for his patriotic services, took a hostile attitude which threatened the latter with pecuniary destruction. In March, 1820, Van Buren threw himself into the contest with a skill and generous fervor which saved the ex-governor. Van Buren's speech of two days for the old chief of the Bucktails, is described by Hammond, a political historian of New York not unduly friendly to Van Buren, to have been "ingenious, able, and eloquent."

It was also in 1820 that Van Buren promoted the reëlection of Rufus King, the distinguished Federalist, to the United States Senate. His motives in doing this were long bitterly assailed; but as the choice was intrinsically admirable, Van Buren was probably glad to gratify a patriotic impulse which was not very inconsistent with party advantage. In 1819 the Republican caucus, the last at which the Bucktails and Clintonians both attended, was broken up amid mutual recriminations. John C. Spencer, the son of Ambrose Spencer, and afterwards a distinguished Whig, was the Clintonian candidate, and had the greater number of Republican votes. In the legislature there was no choice, Rufus King having fewer votes than either of the Republicans. When the legislature of 1820 met, there appeared a pamphlet skillfully written in a tone of exalted patriotism. This decided the election for King. Van Buren was its author, and was said to have been aided by William L. Marcy. Both had suffered at the hands of Clinton. However much they may have been so influenced in secret, they gave in public perfectly sound and weighty reasons for returning this old and distinguished statesman to the place he had honored for many years. In 1813 King had received the votes of a few Republicans, without whom he would have been defeated by a Republican competitor. The Clintonians and their adversaries had since disputed which of them had then been guilty of party disloyalty. But it can hardly be doubted that King's high character and great ability, with the revolutionary glamour about him, made his choice seem patriotic and popular, and therefore politically prudent.

Van Buren's pamphlet of 1820 was addressed to the Republican members of the legislature by a "fellow-member" who told them that he knew and was personally known to most of them, and that he had, "from his infancy, taken a deep interest in the honor and prosperity of the party." This anonymous "fellow-member" pronounced the support of King by Republicans to "be an act honorable to themselves, advantageous to the country, and just to him." He declared that the only reluctance Republicans had to a public avowal of their sentiments arose from a "commendable apprehension that their determination to support him under existing circumstances might subject them to the suspicion of having become a party to a political bargain, to one of those sinister commutations of principle for power, which they think common with their adversaries, and against which they have remonstrated with becoming spirit." He showed that there were degrees even among Federalists; that some in the war had been influenced by "most envenomed malignity against the administration of their own government;" that a second and "very numerous and respectable portion" had been those "who, inured to opposition and heated by collision, were poorly qualified to judge dispassionately of the measures of government," who thought the war impolitic at the time, but who were ignorantly but honestly mistaken; but that a third class of them had risen "superior to the prejudices and passions of those with whom they once acted." In the last class had been Rufus King; at home and in the Senate he had supported the administration; he had helped procure loans to the State for war purposes. The address skillfully recalled his Revolutionary services, his membership in the convention which framed the Federal Constitution, his appointment by Washington as minister to the English court, and his continuance there under Jefferson. He was declared to be opposed to Clinton. The address concluded by reciting that there had been in New York "exceptionable and unprincipled political bargains and coalitions," which with darker offenses ought to be proved, to vindicate the great body of citizens "from the charge of participating in the profligacy of the few, and to give rest to that perturbed spirit which now haunts the scenes of former moral and political debaucheries;" but added that the nature of a vote for King precluded such suspicions.

The last statement was just. King's return was free from other suspicion than that he probably preferred the Van Buren to the Clinton Republicans. Van Buren, seeing that the Federalist party was at an end, was glad both to do a public service and to ally with his party, in the divisions of the future, some part of the element so finely represented by Rufus King. In private Van Buren urged the support of King even more emphatically. "We are committed," he wrote, "to his support. It is both wise and honest, and we must have no fluttering in our course. Mr. King's views towards us are honorable and correct. … Let us not, then, have any halting. I will put my head on its propriety." Van Buren's partisanship always had a mellow character. He practiced the golden rule of successful politics, to foresee future benefits rather than remember past injuries. Indeed, it is just to say more. In sending King to the Senate he doubtless experienced the lofty pleasure which a politician of public spirit feels in his occasional ability to use his power to reach a beneficent end, which without the power he could not have reached—a stroke which to a petty politician would seem dangerous, but which the greater man accomplishes without injury to his party standing. A year or two after King's election, when Van Buren joined him at Washington, there were established the most agreeable relations between them. The refinement and natural decorum of the younger man easily fell in with the polished and courtly manner of the old Federalist. Benton, who had then just entered the Senate, said it was delightful to behold the deferential regard which Van Buren paid to his venerable colleague, a regard always returned by King with marked kindness and respect.

In this year the era of good feeling was at its height. Monroe was reëlected president by an almost unanimous vote, with Tompkins again as vice-president. The good feeling, however, was among the people, and not among the politicians. The Republican party was about to divide by reason of the very completeness of its supremacy. The Federalist party was extinguished and its members scattered. The greater number of them in New York went with the Clintonian Republicans, with whom they afterwards formed the chief body of the Whig party. A smaller number of them, among whom were James A. Hamilton and John C. Hamilton, the sons of the great founder of the Federalist party, William A. Duer, John A. King (the son of the reëlected senator), and many others of wealth and high social position, ranged themselves for a time in the Bucktail ranks under Van Buren's leadership. In the slang of the day, they were the "high-minded Federalists," because they had declared that Clinton's supporters practiced a personal subserviency "disgusting to high-minded and honorable men." With this addition, the Bucktails became the Democratic party in New York. In April, 1820, the gubernatorial election was between the Clintonians supporting Clinton, and the Bucktails supporting Tompkins, the Vice-President. Clinton's recent and really magnificent public service made him successful at the polls, but his party was beaten at other points.

Rufus King's reëlection to the Senate was believed to have some relation to the Missouri question, then agitating the nation. In one of his letters urging his Republican associates to support King, Van Buren declared that the Missouri question concealed no plot so far as King was concerned, but that he, Van Buren, and his friends, would "give it a true direction." King's strong opposition to the admission of Missouri as a slave State was, however, perfectly open. If he returned to the Senate, it was certain he would steadily vote against any extension of slavery. Van Buren knew all this, and doubtless meant that King was bargaining away none of his convictions for the senatorship. But what the "true direction" was which was to be given the Missouri question, is not clear. About the time of King's reëlection Van Buren joined in calling a public meeting at Albany to protest against extending slavery beyond the Mississippi. He was absent at the time of the meeting, and refused the use of his name upon the committee to send the anti-slavery resolutions to Washington. Nor is it clear whether his absence and refusal were significant. He certainly did not condemn the resolutions; and in January, 1820, he voted in the state Senate for an instruction to the senators and representatives in Congress "to oppose the admission, as a State in the Union, of any territory not comprised within the original boundary of the United States, without making the prohibition of slavery therein an indispensable condition of admission." This resolution undoubtedly expressed the clear convictions of the Republicans in New York, whether on Van Buren's or Clinton's side, as well as of the remaining Federalists.

Van Buren's direct interest in national politics had already begun. In 1816 he was present in Washington (then a pretty serious journey from Albany) when the Republican congressional caucus was held to nominate a president. Governor Tompkins, after a brief canvass, retired; and Crawford, then secretary of war, became the candidate against Monroe, and was supported by most of the Republicans from New York. Van Buren's preference was not certainly known, though it is supposed he preferred Monroe. In 1820 he was chosen a presidential elector in place of an absentee from the electoral college, and participated in the all but unanimous vote for Monroe. He voted with the other New York electors for Tompkins for the vice-presidency. In April, 1820, he wrote to Henry Meigs, a Bucktail congressman then at Washington, that the rascality of some of the deputy postmasters in the State was intolerable, and cried aloud for relief; that it was impossible to penetrate the interior of the State with friendly papers; and that two or three prompt removals were necessary. The postmaster-general was to be asked "to do an act of justice and render us a partial service" by the removal of the postmasters at Bath, Little Falls, and Oxford, and to appoint successors whom Van Buren named. In January, 1821, Governor Clinton sent this letter to the legislature, with a message and other papers so numerous as to be carried in a green bag, which gave the name to the message, in support of a charge that the national administration had interfered in the state election. But the "green-bag message" did Van Buren little harm, for Clinton's own proscriptive rigor had been great, and it was only two years before that Van Buren himself had been removed from the attorney-generalship. In 1821 the political division of the New York Republicans was carried to national politics. When a speaker was to be chosen in place of Clay, Taylor of New York, the Republican candidate, was opposed by the Bucktail congressmen, because he had supported Clinton.

In February, 1821, Van Buren gained the then dignified promotion to the federal Senate. He was elected by the Bucktails against Nathan Sanford, the sitting senator, who was supported by the Clintonians and Federalists. Van Buren was now thirty-eight years old, and in the early prime of his powers. He had run the gauntlet of two popular elections; he had been easily first among the Republicans of the state Senate; he had there shown extraordinary political skill and an intelligent and public spirit; he had ably administered the chief law office of the State which was not judicial. Though not yet keenly interested in any federal question—for his activity and thought had been sufficiently engaged in affairs of his own State—he turned to the new field with an easy confidence, amply justified by his mastery of the problems with which he had so far grappled. He reached Washington the undoubted leader of his party in the State. The prestige of Governor Tompkins, although just reëlected vice-president, had suffered from his recent defeat for the governorship, and from his pecuniary and other difficulties; and besides, he obviously had not Van Buren's unrivaled equipment for political leadership.

Before Van Buren attended his first session in the federal capital he performed for the public most honorable service in the state constitutional convention which sat in the autumn of 1821. This body illustrated the earnest and wholesome temper in which the most powerful public men of the State, after many exhibitions of partisan, personal, and even petty animosities, could treat so serious and abiding a matter as its fundamental law. The Democrats sent Vice-President Tompkins, both the United States senators, King and Van Buren, the late senator, Sanford, and Samuel Nelson, then beginning a long and honorable career. The Clintonians and Federalists sent Chancellor Kent and Ambrose Spencer, the chief justice. Van Buren was chosen from Otsego, and not from his own county, probably because the latter was politically unfavorable to him.

This convention was one of the steps in the democratic march. It was called to broaden the suffrage, to break up the central source of patronage at Albany, and to enlarge local self-administration. The government of New York had so far been a freeholders' government, with those great virtues, and those greater and more enduring vices, which were characteristic of a government controlled exclusively by the owners of land. The painful apprehension aroused by the democratic resolution to reduce, if not altogether to destroy, the exclusive privileges of land-owners, was expressed in the convention by Chancellor Kent. He would not "bow before the idol of universal suffrage;" this extreme democratic principle, he said, had "been regarded with terror by the wise men of every age;" wherever tried, it had brought "corruption, injustice, violence, and tyranny;" if adopted, posterity would "deplore in sackcloth and ashes the delusion of the day." He wished no laws to pass without the free consent of the owners of the soil. He did not foresee English parliaments elected in 1885 and 1886 by a suffrage not very far from universal, or a royal jubilee celebrated by democratic masses, or the prudent conservatism in matters of property of the enfranchised French democracy—he foresaw none of these when he declared that England and France could not sustain the weight of universal suffrage; that "the radicals of England, with the force of that mighty engine, would at once sweep away the property, the laws, and the liberty of that island like a deluge." Van Buren distinguished himself in the debate. Upon this exciting and paramount topic he did not share the temper which possessed most of his party. His speech was clear, explicit, philosophical, and really statesmanlike. It so impressed even his adversaries; and Hammond, one of them, declared that he ought for it to be ranked "among the most shining orators and able statesmen of the age."

In reading this, or indeed any of the utterances of Van Buren where the occasion required distinctness, it is difficult to find the ground of the charge of "noncommittalism" so incessantly made against him. He doubtless refrained from taking sides on questions not yet ripe for decision, however clear, and whatever may have been his speculative opinions. But this is the duty of every statesman; it has been the practice of every politician who has promoted reform. Van Buren now pointed out how completely the events of the forty years past had discredited the grave speculative fears of Franklin, Hamilton, and Madison as to the result of some provisions of the Federal Constitution. With Burke he believed experience to be the only unerring touchstone. He conclusively showed that property had been as safe in those American communities which had universal suffrage as in the few which retained a property qualification; that venality in voting, apprehended from the change, already existed in the grossest forms at the parliamentary elections of England. Going to the truth which is at the dynamic source of democratic institutions, he told the chancellor that when among the masses of America the principles of order and good government should yield to principles of anarchy and violence and permit attacks on private property or an agrarian law, all constitutional provisions would be idle and unavailing, because they would have lost all their force and influence. With a true instinct, however, Van Buren wished the steps to be taken gradually. He was not yet ready, he said, to admit to the suffrage the shifting population of cities, held to the government by no other ties than the mere right to vote. He was not ready for a really universal suffrage. The voter ought, if he did not participate in the government by paying taxes or performing militia duty, to be a man who was a householder with some of the elements of stability, with something at stake in the community. Although they had reached "the verge of universal suffrage," he could not with his Democratic friends take the "one step beyond;" he would not cheapen the invaluable right by conferring it with indiscriminating hand "on every one, black or white, who would be kind enough to condescend to accept it." Though a Democrat he was opposed, he said, to a "precipitate and unexpected prostration of all qualifications;" he looked with dread upon increasing the voters in New York city from thirteen or fourteen thousand to twenty-five thousand, believing (curious prediction for a father of the Democratic party!) that the increase "would render their elections rather a curse than a blessing," and "would drive from the polls all sober-minded people."

The universal suffrage then postponed was wisely adopted a few years later. Democracy marched steadily on; and Van Buren was willing, probably very willing, to be guided by experience. He opposed in the convention a proposal supported by most of his party to restrict suffrage to white citizens, but favored a property qualification for black men, the $250 freehold ownership until then required of white voters. He would not, he said, draw from them a revenue and yet deny them the right of suffrage. Twenty-five years later, in 1846, nearly three-fourths of the voters of the State refused equal suffrage to the blacks; and even in 1869, six years after the emancipation proclamation, a majority still refused to give them the same rights as white men.

The question of appointments to office was the chief topic in the convention. Van Buren, as chairman of the committee on this subject, made an interesting and able report. It was unanimously agreed that the use of patronage by the council of appointment had been a scandal. Only a few members voted to retain the council, even if it were to be elected by the people. He recommended that military officers, except the highest, be elected by the privates and officers of militia. Of the 6663 civil officers whose appointment and removal by the council had for twenty years kept the State in turmoil, he recommended that 3643, being notaries, commissioners, masters and examiners in chancery, and other lesser officers, should be appointed under general laws to be enacted by the legislature; the clerks of courts and district attorneys should be appointed by the common pleas courts; mayors and clerks of cities should be appointed by their common councils, except in New York, where for years afterwards the mayors were appointed; the heads of the state departments should be appointed by the legislature; and all other officers, including surrogates and justices of the peace as well as the greater judicial officers, should be appointed by the governor upon the confirmation of the Senate. Van Buren declared himself opposed, here again separating himself from many of his party associates, to the popular election of any judicial officers, even the justices of the peace. Of all this he was long after to be reminded as proof of his aristocratic contempt for democracy. His recommendations were adopted in the main; although county clerks and sheriffs, whom he would have kept appointive, were made elective. Upon this question he was in a small minority with Chancellor Kent and Rufus King, having most of his party friends against him. Thus was broken up the enormous political power so long wielded at Albany, and the patronage distributed through the counties. The change, it was supposed, would end a great abuse. It did end the concentration of patronage at the capital; but the partisan abuses of patronage were simply transferred to the various county seats, to exercise a different and wider, though probably a less dangerous, corruption.

The council of revision fell with hardly a friend to speak for it. It was one of those checks upon popular power of which Federalists had been fond. It consisted of the governor with the chancellor and the judges of the Supreme Court, and had a veto power upon bills passed by the legislature. As the chancellor and judges held office during good behavior until they had reached the limit of age, the council was almost a chamber of life peers. The exercise of its power had provoked great animosity. The chief judicial officers of the State, judges, and chancellors, to whom men of our day look back with a real veneration, had been drawn by it into a kind of political warfare, in which few of our higher magistrates, though popularly elected and for terms, would dare to engage. An act had been passed by the legislature in 1814 to promote privateering; but Chancellor Kent as a member of the council objected to it. Van Buren maintained with him an open and heated discussion upon the propriety of the objections—a discussion in which the judicial character justly enough afforded no protection. Van Buren's feeling against the judges who were his political adversaries was often exhibited. He said in the convention: "I object to the council, as being composed of the judiciary, who are not directly responsible to the people. I object to it because it inevitably connects the judiciary—those who, with pure hearts and sound heads, should preside in the sanctuaries of justice—with the intrigues and collisions of party strife; because it tends to make our judges politicians, and because such has been its practical effect." He further said that he would not join in the rather courtly observation that the council was abolished because of a personal regard for the peace of its members. He would have it expressly remembered that the council had served the ends of faction; though he added that he should regard the loss of Chancellor Kent from his judicial station as a public calamity. In his general position Van Buren was clearly right. Again and again have theorists, supposing judges to be sanctified and illumined by their offices, placed in their hands political power, which had been abused, or it was feared would be abused, by men fancied to occupy less exalted stations. Again and again has the result shown that judges are only men, with human passions, prejudices, and ignorance; men who, if vested with functions not judicial, if freed from the checks of precedents and law and public hearings and appellate review, fall into the same abuses and act on the same motives, political and personal, which belong to other men. In the council of revision before 1821 and the electoral commission of 1877 were signally proved the wisdom of restricting judges to the work of deciding rights between parties judicially brought before them.

Van Buren's far from "non-committal" talk about the judges was not followed by any support of the proposal to "constitutionize" them out of office. The animosity of a majority of the members against the judges then in office was intense; and they were not willing to accept the life of the council of revision as a sufficient sacrifice. Nor was the animosity entirely unreasonable. Butler, in one of his early letters to Jesse Hoyt, described the austerity with which Ambrose Spencer, the chief justice, when the young lawyer sought to address him, told him to wait until his seniors had been heard. In the convention there were doubtless many who had been offended with a certain insolence of place which to this day characterizes the bearing of many judges of real ability; and the opportunity of making repayment was eagerly seized. Nor was it unreasonable that laymen should, from the proceedings of judges when acting upon political matters which laymen understood as well as they, make inferences about the fairness of their proceedings on the bench upon which laymen could not always safely speak. By a vote of 66 to 39, the convention refused to retain the judges then in office—a proceeding which, with all the faults justly or even naturally found with them, was a gross violation of the fundamental rule which ought to guide civilized lands in changing their laws. For the retention of the judges was perfectly consistent with the judicial scheme adopted. Van Buren put all this most admirably before voting with the minority. He told the convention, and doubtless truly, that from the bench of judges, whose official fate was then at their mercy, he had been assailed "with hostility, political, professional, and personal—hostility which had been the most keen, active, and unyielding;" but that he would not indulge individual resentment in the prostration of his private and political adversary. The judicial officer, who could not be reached by impeachment or the proceeding for removal by a two-thirds vote, ought not to be disturbed. They should amend the constitution, he told the convention, upon general principles, and not descend to pull down obnoxious officers. He begged it not to ruin its character and credit by proceeding to such extremities. But the removal of the judges did not prove unpopular. Only eight members of the convention voted against the Constitution; only fifteen others did not sign it. And the freeholders of the State, while deliberately surrendering some of their exclusive privileges, adopted it by a vote of 75,422 to 41,497.

Van Buren's service in this convention was that of a firm, sensible, far-seeing man, resolute to make democratic progress, but unwilling, without further light from experience, to take extreme steps difficult to retrace. With a strong inclination towards great enlargement of the suffrage, he pointed out that a mistake in going too far could never be righted "except by the sword." The wisdom of enduring temporary difficulties, rather than to make theoretical changes greater than were necessary to obviate serious and great wrongs, was common to him with the highest and most influential type of modern law-makers. With some men of the first rank, the convention had in it very many others crudely equipped for its work; and it met in an atmosphere of personal and political asperity unfavorable to deliberations over organic law. Van Buren was politically its most powerful member. It is clear that his always conservative temper, aided by his tact and by his temperate and persuasive eloquence, held back his Democratic associates, headed by the impetuous and angered General Root, from changes far more radical than those which were made. Though eminent as a party man, he showed on this conspicuous field undoubted courage and independence and high sense of duty. Entering national politics he was fortunate therefore to be known, not only as a skillful and adroit and even managing politician, as a vigorous and clear debater, as a successful leader in popular movements, but also as a man of firm and upright patriotism, with a ripe and educated sense of the complexity of popular government, and a sober appreciation of the kind of dangers so subtly mingled with the blessings of democracy.