Martin Van Buren Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Editor’s Note

  Prologue

  1. Kinderhook

  2. Regency

  3. Democracy

  4. Ascendancy

  5. Panic

  6. Shadows

  7. Chicanery

  8. Resurgemus

  9. Oblivion

  Notes

  Milestones

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Also by Ted Widmer

  The American Presidents Series

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Two Grandfathers Who Loved History:

  EDWARD MASON READ III

  ROBERT JEAN RENE WIDMER

  and for

  FREDDY

  Editor’s Note

  THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY

  The president is the central player in the American political order. That would seem to contradict the intentions of the Founding Fathers. Remembering the horrid example of the British monarchy, they invented a separation of powers in order, as Justice Brandeis later put it, “to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.” Accordingly, they divided the government into three allegedly equal and coordinate branches—the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.

  But a system based on the tripartite separation of powers has an inherent tendency toward inertia and stalemate. One of the three branches must take the initiative if the system is to move. The executive branch alone is structurally capable of taking that initiative. The Founders must have sensed this when they accepted Alexander Hamilton’s proposition in the Seventieth Federalist that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” They thus envisaged a strong president—but within an equally strong system of constitutional accountability. (The term imperial presidency arose in the 1970s to describe the situation when the balance between power and accountability is upset in favor of the executive.)

  The American system of self-government thus comes to focus in the presidency—”the vital place of action in the system,” as Woodrow Wilson put it. Henry Adams, himself the great-grandson and grandson of presidents as well as the most brilliant of American historians, said that the American president “resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.” The men in the White House (thus far only men, alas) in steering their chosen courses have shaped our destiny as a nation.

  Biography offers an easy education in American history, rendering the past more human, more vivid, more intimate, more accessible, more connected to ourselves. Biography reminds us that presidents are not supermen. They are human beings too, worrying about decisions, attending to wives and children, juggling balls in the air, and putting on their pants one leg at a time. Indeed, as Emerson contended, “There is properly no history; only biography.”

  Presidents serve us as inspirations, and they also serve us as warnings. They provide bad examples as well as good. The nation, the Supreme Court has said, has “no right to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln.”

  The men in the White House express the ideals and the values, the frailties and the flaws, of the voters who send them there. It is altogether natural that we should want to know more about the virtues and the vices of the fellows we have elected to govern us. As we know more about them, we will know more about ourselves. The French political philosopher Joseph de Maistre said, “Every nation has the government it deserves.”

  At the start of the twenty-first century, forty-two men have made it to the Oval Office. (George W. Bush is counted our forty-third president, because Grover Cleveland, who served nonconsecutive terms, is counted twice.) Of the parade of presidents, a dozen or so lead the polls periodically conducted by historians and political scientists. What makes a great president?

  Great presidents possess, or are possessed by, a vision of an ideal America. Their passion, as they grasp the helm, is to set the ship of state on the right course toward the port they seek. Great presidents also have a deep psychic connection with the needs, anxieties, dreams of people. “I do not believe,” said Wilson, “that any man can lead who does not act … under the impulse of a profound sympathy with those whom he leads—a sympathy which is insight—an insight which is of the heart rather than of the intellect.”

  “All of our great presidents,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt, “were leaders of thought at a time when certain ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” So Washington incarnated the idea of federal union, Jefferson and Jackson the idea of democracy, Lincoln union and freedom, Cleveland rugged honesty. Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, said FDR, were both “moral leaders, each in his own way and his own time, who used the presidency as a pulpit.”

  To succeed, presidents not only must have a port to seek but they must convince Congress and the electorate that it is a port worth seeking. Politics in a democracy is ultimately an educational process, an adventure in persuasion and consent. Every president stands in Theodore Roosevelt’s bully pulpit.

  The greatest presidents in the scholars’ rankings, Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, were leaders who confronted and overcame the republic’s greatest crises. Crisis widens presidential opportunities for bold and imaginative action. But it does not guarantee presidential greatness. The crisis of secession did not spur Buchanan or the crisis of depression spur Hoover to creative leadership. Their inadequacies in the face of crisis allowed Lincoln and the second Roosevelt to show the difference individuals make to history. Still, even in the absence of first-order crisis, forceful and persuasive presidents—Jackson, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan—are able to impose their own priorities on the country.

  The diverse drama of the presidency offers a fascinating set of tales. Biographies of American presidents constitute a chronicle of wisdom and folly, nobility and pettiness, courage and cunning, forthrightness and deceit, quarrel and consensus. The turmoil perennially swirling around the White House illuminates the heart of the American democracy.

  It is the aim of the American Presidents series to present the grand panorama of our chief executives in volumes compact enough for the busy reader, lucid enough for the student, authoritative enough for the scholar. Each volume offers a distillation of character and career. I hope that these lives will give readers some understanding of the pitfalls and potentialities of the presidency and also of the responsibilities of citizenship. Truman’s famous sign—”The buck stops here”—tells only half the story. Citizens cannot escape the ultimate responsibility. It is in the voting booth, not on the presidential desk, that the buck finally stops.

  —Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  Prologue

  Good Lord! What is VAN!—for though simple he looks,

  Tis a task to unravel his looks and his crooks;

  With his depths and his shallows, his good and his evil,

  All in all, he’s a Riddle must puzzle the devil.

  —DAVY CROCKETT, The Life of Martin Van Buren (1835)

  In June 1854, a small, elderly man rented rooms overlooking the central plaza of Sorrento, the ancient city j
utting into the Mediterranean from a peninsula south of Naples. In a place originally devoted to the worship of the Sirens, the women who drove seafarers mad with their blandishments, he had come to hear the muse of history, and to write the story of his life.

  To the locals, of course, he was merely another paying customer. They could not be expected to know that their guest was the eighth president of the United States, Martin Van Buren—by far the eldest living president, and the last of the great generation of leaders who had held the stage during the turbulent period between the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. Jackson, Adams, Clay, Webster, Calhoun—all dead—and still Van Buren soldiered on, besting his adversaries yet again by the simple fact of his endurance. “At the age of seventy-one, and in a foreign land, I commence a sketch of the principal events of my life,” he wrote with a faintly triumphal air.

  In truth, there was something less than presidential in his appearance, and the people of Sorrento might be forgiven for their indifference. At five feet six inches, Van Buren was the shortest American leader since James Madison. He now looked older than his pictures, which included some of the first daguerreotypes taken of a former president, and the thin wisps of hair around his scalp gave him a mild, cherubic appearance. Long ago, in compensation for his baldness, he had grown a pair of truly executive sideburns, to use a term that would not come into vogue until an inept Civil War general, Ambrose E. Burnside, gave it currency. But southern Italy was still a hodgepodge of small kingdoms and provincial concerns, one of many parts of the globe where the creation of the world’s first democracy had made absolutely no difference to anyone. If Van Buren’s sideburns were worthy of an Augustus, still it was unclear to the people watching him who, exactly, he was. That problem has not entirely disappeared.

  As Van Buren addressed himself to the task of self-definition, he reflected on his nearness to Pompeii, discovered in 1748 and then being excavated. There the past had come arrestingly to life, thanks to the lava and ash that had swallowed an entire village and captured unbearably ordinary moments for eternity.

  Van Buren, too, wanted to preserve a moment frozen in fire. But which volcanic eruption to choose from? His stormy first campaigns? His presidency? The financial catastrophe that ruined it? His rise at an extraordinarily young age to complete political mastery of New York, the most populous state in the Union? Or perhaps none of the above—maybe it was better just to begin with his carefree youth in the Hudson Valley, when the United States of America was less than a decade old, a mere velleity, a gleam in George Washington’s eye.

  So much had happened since his first campaign, the Revolution of 1800. A stripling of seventeen, he had worked desperately hard for his idols, Jefferson and Burr, and was rewarded with a trip to his first party caucus in Troy, a well-named place to begin the Homeric odyssey that had brought him to the Mediterranean. The epic battles that followed had seemed so intense at the time—the struggle over Missouri, then the tariff, then the bank, then Texas and Mexico, then the bitter Free Soil campaign of 1848, each fight leading to the next, and beneath almost all of them, a secret underlying obsession with the subject that dared not speak its name—slavery. Now they were just historical episodes, already enshrouded in the mist that was creeping over all of his recollections. Before long, they would simply be chapters in a book.

  What did it all matter here in Sorrento, where the ghosts of imperial Rome held sway, and two thousand years held about as much significance as the gesticulations of an impatient waiter? Washington, D.C., where he had passed so much of his public life, had once aspired to surpass Rome—ridiculously, a dirty creek was called the Tiber, but of course the name failed to stick. Quite a few of the founders’ lofty aspirations now seemed overly ambitious.

  As he surveyed the sweep of his life, Van Buren’s thoughts must have turned to one of his most meaningful friendships, with the writer Washington Irving. They had met decades ago, and had even become roommates in London in 1831, when Van Buren was expecting to become the American envoy, before a rival’s treachery did him in. But it went much deeper than that. In 1809, Irving had lived in Van Buren’s native Kinderhook while he was recovering from the death of his fiancée and searching out Hudson Valley ghost stories for material. In fact, he lived in the same house that Van Buren would later christen Lindenwald (“Linden forest”) when he acquired it as his country seat. While inhabiting Van Buren’s future home, Irving created some of the most enduring characters in American literature, including Ichabod Crane and Diedrich Knickerbocker. But no story better illustrates the tension between the American past and present than “Rip Van Winkle,” Irving’s masterpiece and a parable for the frustrated historian, out of sorts with current events, and unable to arrange the past exactly as he would like it. As the former president assembled the fragmented pieces of his life, stretching back to the earliest years of the republic, he must have felt like a disoriented Rip Van Buren, the creature of distant time and place.

  But we will never know the answer to these speculations, because with characteristic opaqueness, Van Buren never wrote the book that would have revealed himself to us. Yes, his autobiography is arguably the first presidential memoir, and for that reason alone it holds real interest. But it stops short of the presidency, digresses like a runaway train, and reveals only the skimpiest personal information. There are flashes of personality here and there, and glimpses of the greatness he both encountered and summoned in his long career, but these moments are obfuscated by the long, stem-winding passages that constitute the core of the Van Buren opus. If possible, it is even harder to slog through than the memoirs of Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Harry Truman, and that is saying something.

  That is only one of the reasons that Martin Van Buren eludes us today. He has been escaping pursuers since they began chasing him, which may explain why “the Fox” was one of his many nicknames. Has any other president held so many? The Red Fox of Kinderhook. The Little Magician. The Enchanter. The Careful Dutchman. The Great Manager. The Master Spirit. The American Talleyrand. King Martin. Matty Van.

  This surfeit of sobriquets suggests both a familiarity with Van Buren and an ultimate failure to catch him. The names cancel each other out, they disagree with each other, and they suggest an inscrutability that still hangs like Spanish moss around him. Truly, there was something vulpine about the Fox. He eludes easy classification by the phrenologists of the historical profession, who measure the bumps and gouges of presidents to determine their lasting significance (at last glance, he ranked twenty-first out of forty-three). He eludes us because he apparently destroyed those parts of his correspondence that would have revealed his innermost secrets. He eludes us because his loyal confederates divulged precious little of their private thinking about him.

  But mostly he eludes us because no one is looking for him anymore. He’s a lost president, floating in purgatory between Jackson and the Civil War, unremembered by most, and doomed to occupy the least heroic categories designed by historians (he has a lock on “average”). Weirdly, he was placed on a pedestal by Ezra Pound, the architect of lost causes. But that’s hardly a case for immortality in our amnesiac culture. On the extremely rare occasions when his image is presented before modern Americans, it is either disappointing (the cad-president in Amistad who turns a deaf ear to the African plea for freedom) or farcical (on Seinfeld, the idol of a secret society in New York, “the Van Buren Boys,” whom Kramer discovers when he accidentally sticks eight fingers in the air—the invocation for all loyalists to the eighth president).

  Once it was not so. Approximately six generations ago, it was impossible not to have an opinion about Martin Van Buren. And these opinions were not for the faint of heart. In certain quarters, Van Buren was the most hated man in America. He was pilloried in cartoons (where his size and baldness made him an easy target), attacked in speeches on the floor of Congress, and privately despised by millions. At the same time, he was defended by his stalwart friends, and admired, if not exactly
loved, by millions more—particularly the small freeholders who felt threatened by the incursions of new elites—callous bankers, wanton plantation owners, greedy merchants and factory owners. He was accused of being noncommittal (a word he is said to have invented), but in truth it was America that had trouble making up its mind about him. For good or ill, he provided a steady stream of fodder for the new penny newspapers flooding eastern cities, and his every utterance was subjected to close scrutiny by hierophants of America’s political religion. Why did so many people find humor in the name Little Van? Because he was big. It was the pictures that got small.

  There was a widespread refusal, then as now, to admit that Martin Van Buren accomplished what he did. In what might have been the most talented political generation in American history, he alone achieved what every politician in America wanted desperately: the succession of Andrew Jackson. Has there ever been a rival to the class of 1782? That year saw the birth of Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Thomas Hart Benton, and Martin Van Buren. Each rose to dominate his state, and then battled the others in the Senate. Only one became president.

  When he was elected in 1836, Van Buren became the first chief executive from New York, and the first ethnic president. Both facts are important. New York City, with two hundred thousand people in 1830, and many more in 1836, was indisputably the capital of the American future. The Erie Canal, finished in 1825, had brought the enormous riches of the interior into New York’s backyard. The city was growing exponentially in all directions. From Ireland, from Germany, from a thousand little villages in New England, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, young men and women were streaming into Manhattan to write a better future for themselves. They were not exactly Jefferson’s rural yeomanry; in fact, they represented a deep threat to his stubborn vision of an Anglo-Saxon agricultural republic. (Jefferson felt, with pathological intensity, that cities were an open sore on the body politic.) They were an unruly lot, living in cramped quarters, working desperately hard for a living that no one was about to give them. But they were good Americans, and deserved a voice in the affairs of the republic. Martin Van Buren helped to give it to them.