Martin Van Buren Page 5
Each apprenticeship seemed to prepare him for the next stage. He was learning prodigiously, and meeting more and more luminaries from outside Columbia County. Just as Lincoln would do in Illinois, he traveled the circuit, talking about people and politics everywhere he went. One source claims that he was developing a useful skill for a politician—the ability to walk into a tavern and hold an enormous amount of alcohol without any sign of impairment.
Obviously, it was only a matter of time before this young attorney committed to his true calling. If Van Buren was mild-mannered, he was still intensely ambitious, a fact that none of his supporters ever denied and which his enemies were quick to point out as a flaw. In 1812, Van Buren ran for the state senate, and profited from his new reputation as a champion of the people to win the Republican nomination from two wealthier candidates. His election opponent was Edward Livingston, the scion of another great New York family and the apparent favorite for the seat.
Although Van Buren could command the votes of the main body of Republican voters, the early results suggested that Livingston had won. Van Buren climbed aboard a steamboat at Hudson and prepared to resume his legal career by attending the spring session at New York City. “Whilst I was arranging my luggage and my papers, my opponents, headed by the leading men of my county, were celebrating their supposed victory at the Hotel on the opposite side of the street, and when I left my door the most jubilant among them appeared on the piazza and shed upon me, at parting, the light of their beaming countenances.”
Then, as the boat passed Catskill, Van Buren noticed his brother-in-law waving from shore and pointing to a small rowboat making its way toward the steamer. It was bringing the news that Van Buren had won more votes than at first counted, and had eked out victory by fewer than 200 votes out of 40,000 cast. It was appropriate that he received the news on a steamboat, symbolic of the contrivances that were taking men of the nineteenth century to places they had never been before. He called this moment “my political birth and baptism.” At twenty-nine, he was the second youngest senator ever elected in New York. From then until the end of his presidency, he would serve almost continuously in government service.
This, then, was a worthy beginning. Kinderhook would mark Van Buren forever. It had given him a wife, a family, countless friends, a career, and more than a few enemies. It had brought him into contact with the humble, the great, and the mass of people in between. It had taught him how much America offers to a youth of talent and how much it can take out of someone who seeks more power than he is offered. It had taught him to speak for himself, and to speak for others like him, to be willing to stand up for principles against those who were all for democracy as long as it was restricted to themselves. All in all, it was a good place to begin.
2
Regency
In 1842, Jabez Hammond published The History of Political Parties in the State of New York, in three octavo volumes. If you can even find it in a library, there is a good chance that you will be the first person to have taken it out in a century and a half. Yet beneath its ancient leather binding, the brittle pages teem with life. Hammond’s saga explores the sinuous windings of New York politics across three generations, at the dawn of the republican experiment. Aaron Spelling could hardly ask for more: colossal egos in conflict, visionary acts of statecraft, and the petty acts of villainy that no less truly define our politics. In short, Hammond tells the story of democracy’s journey from idea to thing. For the patient reader, its hieroglyphics offer a Rosetta stone, translating the long-lost world of the early republic into something comprehensible and restoring our sense that the founders, for all their idealism, were also men of the world, given to selfishness like any other generation. Despite his dated language, Hammond ranks with A. J. Liebling, Edwin O’Connor, and Robert Penn Warren as a chronicler of the American political process. His secret hero is Martin Van Buren, who ushered in the new world and gave a kick in the pants to the old.
Van Buren’s term in the New York Senate began on the Fourth of July, 1812. He made the most of the opportunity, and then some. He arrived at the Senate “dressed in a green coat, buff breeches, and white topped boots, and withal bearing himself somewhat jauntily.” He never looked back. Within a decade he would become the undisputed master of New York at the precise moment that New York was beginning the unchecked growth that would place the Empire State at the center of American politics for a century and more.
That was not the only respect in which the young senator’s timing was excellent. Almost exactly as he took office, the War of 1812 erupted, the unfortunate collision of insulting English behavior toward Americans on the high seas and war fever among jingoistic young politicians who were just beginning to make a name for themselves—John Calhoun of South Carolina, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and many others from the South and West, where war was remote and therefore romantic.
For New Yorkers, war with Great Britain was anything but a daydream. The conflict could not have been more immediate, not only for its disruption of commerce, but also for the fact that New York was a principal theater throughout the hostilities. Just as they had twenty-five years earlier, British troops menaced New Yorkers from all directions. They burned Buffalo, they attacked shipping on the Great Lakes, they threatened Lake Champlain and the upper Hudson, and for three long years they committed strikes along the entire length of the endless Canadian border. To make matters worse, New England was on the verge of secession, and the national leadership in Washington was divided and weak. New York was caught in the middle of a bad situation.
But if the war was severely disruptive, it also presented an unusual opportunity for a young organizational wizard. Like so many he would later spar with (Jackson, Calhoun, Clay, Harrison, Cass), Van Buren came out of the war with a larger reputation. For the rest of his life, he would measure friends and rivals by their bellicosity in 1812. Even before his election, he had spoken out against England, and his ardor for the war effort was increased by the fact that this was another way to stick it to the Federalists, whose support for Republican foreign policy was lukewarm at best.
After the war broke out, Van Buren quickly threw himself into the defense of New York, America, and democracy—and an address he gave in 1813 shows that he considered all three to be one and the same. This was no mere struggle for military advantage—he felt that the very idea of republicanism was under assault from the hated British. (And we should not forget that for the Dutch-speaking Van Buren, the British were always foreigners.) “The only free people on earth,” living in “the last republic,” needed to stand up now and prove “whether man is capable of self-government, whether our republic must go the way of its predecessors.” “The eyes of the world are directed towards us,” with democracy hinging on the result. Opposing these manly thoughts were “the seductive wiles and blandishments of the corrupt minions of aristocracy”—a phrase that might apply to the patroons as well as to the British.
After a critical election swung support to the Republicans, an emergency session of the legislature was called in September 1814 to shore up support for what appeared to be a losing war effort. Only two weeks before the session, an American naval victory on Lake Champlain had thwarted a British advance, or otherwise the British might have been passing laws in Albany. The result of this scare was a flurry of desperate war measures to raise troops and money, the centerpiece of which was Van Buren’s Classification Bill, a bold proposal to allow New York to conscript twelve thousand white men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Intriguingly, the young legislator had help from an old friend—Aaron Burr, who helped him to draft the fairly radical legislation. The bill passed through the frightened assembly, and would have been put into effect if not mooted by the end of the war in early 1815. Thomas Hart Benton called it “the most energetic war measure ever adopted in our America.” Political enemies would do their best later on to make fun of the fact that Van Buren had not distinguished himself on the field of battle, but he had made
a genuine contribution, and Benton wrote that news of the Classification Bill was received in Washington “with an exultation only inferior to that with which was received the news of the victory of New Orleans.” Another wise move was a public resolution Van Buren offered in the happy aftermath of the Battle of New Orleans, praising “Major General Jackson, his gallant officers and troops, for their wonderful, and heroic victory in defence of the grand emporium of the West.” That, too, would come in handy.
For these and other reasons that we may never fully understand, power began to flow to Van Buren, remarkably swiftly. It was not merely that he was prescient in supporting people who would help him later. He was also a gifted legislator, comfortable in the salons where deals were struck, quick to see how one favor might lead to another. He was unfailingly easy to get along with, as even his enemies admitted. He was a workhorse, rising at 4:30 in the morning. He could count votes faster than any of his peers, and quietly arrange for members to arrive or disappear at the last moment to tilt a vote one way or the other.
He also chose good issues to identify himself with. From the moment he started his career, he was the friend of the small farmer. As Franklin Roosevelt would do a century later, he tried to ease the credit burden on rural producers who were cash poor. In particular, he lashed out at the common practice of imprisonment for debt, which in his opinion was the same thing as a jail sentence “for the misfortune of being poor, of being unable to satisfy the all-digesting stomach of some ravenous creditor.” It was this campaign, rather extraordinarily, that would provoke Ezra Pound to poetic rapture at a time when Van Buren’s name was all but forgotten. His thirty-seventh canto begins, “‘Thou shalt not,’ said Martin Van Buren, ‘jail ’em for debt.’” Van Buren also vehemently opposed the rechartering of the Bank of the United States in 1812, not only because it concentrated resources in a relatively small number of hands, but because so many of its supporters were Federalists. And he continued to snipe at the great landed families.
As Van Buren quickly climbed the ladder, it became clear to him that the chaotic state of New York politics was in itself a reason that legislative progress had been slow on the issues that mattered to his constituents. He sensed that the state was ready for a new politics, more tightly organized, quicker to pounce. As he discovered the issues that mattered to him, and the politicians who shared his sentiments, he naturally begin to think of harnessing them together as a new organization. It could not have escaped his attention that the large numbers of people coming into New York would provide even further support once their votes could be counted.
Of course, there had been earlier political organizations in New York, led by the great figures of the founding generation. It would be hard to think of more charismatic leaders than Hamilton, who invented the Federalist Party, or Burr, who founded Tammany Hall. Van Buren could not match them for personality. But in effect, that was precisely the point—personality was irrelevant to a smooth-functioning machine, and that is what he set out to build. The Careful Dutchman had an instinctive sense of how to create an organization. If he had grown up in Lowell, Massachusetts, he would have become a textile tycoon. In New York, faster than any other politician of his day, he learned how to harness a far greater source of power than the mill races of the Merrimack River—the people themselves.
It has never been easy to offer a simple tour through the thickets and brambles of New York politics, then or now. John Calhoun once sighed that the state’s politics “have always been a great deep.” Van Buren’s great contribution was to impose a new order on them, and the party that he began to fashion in the 1810s and 1820s is more accurately the ancestor of the modern Democratic Party than Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans, though Jefferson gets all of the credit.
He was simply the right man for the right moment. The Federalists, founded with a burst of energy in the 1790s, were increasingly out of touch with the rapidly changing American scene. It was not simply that they had handled themselves poorly during the war, it was the disappearance of an entire culture that had nurtured them. Life had accelerated appreciably in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Steamboats plied the waters of New York harbor; new mercantile concerns sent ships around the world; investments in the West brought untold riches to those who made them wisely. The center of this new capital and new energy was of course Manhattan, but its effects could be felt in the farthest reaches of the Empire State. As such, the old politics of personal influence, dominated by great families, was coming to an end. There would be no more uncles arranging favors for nephews with nosebleeds.
Van Buren set about building a disciplined political organization, driven by strict loyalty, careful working out of positions, and reasonable meritocracy. His efficiency sounded the death knell of the ancien régime, and they loathed him for it. In 1824 the last patroon, Stephen Van Rensselaer, complained bitterly, “Party mixes with every question.” Four years later, he retired from politics because party battles “are too disgusting for my Ear as I have ever kept good company. Vulgarity disgusts me.” Even when former Federalists tried to enlist with Van Buren, they didn’t quite fit in.
But as Van Buren made his way in the world, he also noticed that the path to glory was crowded. One obstacle, in particular, loomed larger than all the others. In the second decade of the nineteenth century, voters were blinded by the bright sun of a personality who dominated New York politics—De Witt Clinton, the “Magnus Apollo.” Clinton, the nephew of former governor George Clinton, was mayor of New York and a former senator. For over a decade he had dazzled voters and politicians alike with his confidence and vision—although he had put off more than a few of them with his arrogance. He was a difficult politician to categorize—wealthy in his background and taste, he voted Jeffersonian on most issues and did not suffer fools gladly. Clinton knew his worth and felt not only that New York should take the presidency away from Virginia, but that he should be the person to do it.
At first, Van Buren and Clinton were friendly. Clinton helped with his election, and as soon as Van Buren entered the state senate, he supported Clinton’s drive to unseat James Madison and run for the White House in 1812. It was a difficult cause for Van Buren to champion, for it involved a temporary alliance with New York Federalists, and Van Buren had to resort to some electoral trickery to swing New York’s delegation behind Clinton—exactly the sort of maneuver that would later arouse suspicion.
Predictably, the quixotic bid failed, and as Clinton resumed his imperious ways, Van Buren grew annoyed with him. To some extent, the rupture emanated from Van Buren’s sense that Clinton was lying to him. But surely there were other reasons, and none may have been simpler than the fact that each saw in the other a dangerous rival. A biographer who was close to Van Buren, William Allen Butler, once said that he was “guided by an intellect which looked into the centre of things, and into the secrets of men.” Somehow, when he looked at Clinton, he saw something that he didn’t like. A small clue may come from the dismissive tone that Clinton used to derogate a letter that Van Buren had written, calling it “equally offensive to grammar and to truth.” That was the language a wealthy gentleman used to humiliate his manservant, and it must have cut Van Buren deeply. A nineteenth-century biographer wrote that their struggle had “something of the gall and wormwood of a family quarrel.”
In a way, they were the opposite of each other. Clinton, well born, oversized, still had some of the characteristics of the eighteenth century—the century of great families, great deeds, and individual glory. Van Buren, diminutive, with superior organizational skills, was already planning the nineteenth century. Clinton was a popular leader, but erratic, often forming temporary alliances that diluted his politics. Van Buren saw the party as inviolate, and was disturbed by the caprices of Clinton’s leadership. Their personalities were different as well. An observer wrote, “Mr. Clinton was reserved in manner, but gave free utterance to his thoughts,—Mr. Van Buren was frank in manner, but concealed his thou
ghts. Mr. Clinton was always bold and decided,—Mr. Van Buren only so at the proper time. The former studied books,—the latter men. The one could scarcely control himself, much less govern others; the other was complete master of himself, and therefore, easily obtained the mastery over others.”
Inevitably, they began to oppose each other, although in such a stealthy way that it was rarely clear who had the upper hand or who, in fact, was trying to do what to the other. With his usual efficiency, Van Buren set out to diminish Clinton’s influence, to enlarge his own, and to build a durable party structure that would brush aside individual idiosyncrasies in favor of larger goals. The break came in 1813, when Clinton asked Van Buren to renominate him for lieutenant governor, and Van Buren gave such a sarcastic speech about Clinton that it was clear he was his enemy. Clinton called him “that prince of villains.” He was the first in a long line of strong political personalities who would butt heads with Van Buren and walk away wondering how he had lost.
Strengthened by the war effort, Van Buren was elected attorney general in 1815 and began to gather around him a host of talented young supporters, following the model Aaron Burr had set fifteen years earlier. They were loosely bound by their dislike for Clinton, but they also seem to have genuinely liked each other. These young lawyers and journalists, often both at the same time, increasingly looked to Van Buren as their leader. They included men who would form the core of the New York Democracy: Benjamin Butler, John Edmonds, William L. Marcy, and the future senator and governor Silas Wright. Some came to Van Buren simply as law clerks; others he found during his frequent trips around the state. According to Silas Wright’s amusing account, he met Van Buren after he accidentally pushed him into the water during a ferry ride. They would become lifelong friends.