Martin Van Buren

by Ted Widmer

  Between 1817 and 1821, these sympathetic friends cohered into a more sophisticated political organization than New York had ever known. They developed a clear party ideology, they were loyal to one another, and they used the press brilliantly to explain themselves. Back in 1813, in his first year as a state senator, Van Buren had helped to found a newspaper, the Albany Argus, and in 1820 he became one of the paper’s chief investors. At first, Clinton’s opponents were loosely characterized as “the Bucktails,” after a hat worn by Tammany Hall supporters. As Van Buren’s new party gained more power, they also attracted more sophisticated names. Some called them “the Holy Alliance,” but the name that eventually stuck, coined by the young journalist Thurlow Weed, was “the Albany Regency.” Weed wrote, “I do not believe that a stronger political combination ever existed at any state capital, or even at the national capital. They were men of great ability, great industry, indomitable courage, and strict personal integrity.”

  Simply put, the party wanted to return to Jeffersonian principles, but to do so in a way that was consonant with New York’s extraordinary growth. They wanted to defend small farmers from predatory special interests, but they also drew strength from the mounting population of New York City. They were philosophically opposed to large government expenditures but, after some soul-searching, came to support the biggest public project of the era—the Erie Canal, also known as “Clinton’s Ditch” in honor of De Witt Clinton. After Van Buren overcame his early objections, he gave an emotionally charged speech defending the project. For all their difficulties, Clinton and Van Buren shook hands.

  It is odd that we now call this the Era of Good Feelings. So many disgruntled politicians were working to destroy one another, and the absence of a two-party system did little to foster civility. Jabez Hammond wrote that “the party spirit had raged more in this than in any other state in the union,” and he blamed it on the great temptation to give jobs to friends, a practice Clinton excelled in, but which Van Buren also enjoyed. Despite their truce over the Erie Canal, Clinton and Van Buren continued to build rival factions, both nominally Republican but clearly different. They struggled for dominance for a decade. When Clinton was riding high, he laughed at Van Buren’s misfortune, comparing him to an old Flemish painting of Jonah, expectorated by the whale, and “having a very bewildered and dismal physiognomy, not knowing from whence he came nor to what place bound.” On another occasion, he described him as a torpid serpent, lulled to sleep by a favor, “but if you warm him he will sting.” Van Buren returned the compliment, calling Clinton “the snake.” Clinton’s ascent to the governor’s mansion in 1817 was a severe setback for Van Buren, and he entered political purgatory for a time.

  One year was especially difficult. On February 5, 1819, Hannah Van Buren died of tuberculosis, leaving the thirty-six-year-old Van Buren a widower with four sons. His father and mother had died not long before. Van Buren stayed home for a week after the funeral, physically and emotionally depleted. Later that year, he was removed from his position as attorney general. He was nearly appointed to the state Supreme Court, but before he could consider the proposal, it was vetoed by the governor—De Witt Clinton. Van Buren had reached a low ebb. Hammond believed that if Van Buren had been tendered this position, he would have voluntarily removed himself from elective politics forever. “He appeared to be tired of the eternal political struggles to which he seemed doomed, and such, in truth, he told me was the fact,” Hammond wrote.

  It was a difficult year for another reason. The proposed admission of Missouri to the Union excited an unprecedented noise over what would become the great dilemma of American history. In February 1819, a New York congressman, James Tallmadge, proposed an amendment barring the further introduction of slaves into Missouri. A series of speeches by New York senator Rufus King followed, excoriating the spread of slavery as dangerous to the Union. King was an especially powerful advocate, having attended the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and, as John Quincy Adams recorded, “the great slaveholders in the House gnawed their lips and clutched their fists as they heard him.”

  As usual, New York was right in the middle of this national debate. Although King was an old Federalist, he and Van Buren were friendly, drawn together by their mutual distrust of De Witt Clinton. Van Buren went along with the growing anti-slavery movement in New York, too far for some and not far enough for many. He signed his name to a list of people calling for a meeting on Missouri in Albany, but he did not attend the actual meeting and used his failure to attend as a pretext for not signing the anti-slavery document produced by the meeting. When he ran for president in 1836, fact-checkers would pore over these early events in New York to look for signs that Van Buren had acted decisively for or against the peculiar institution: they all came away empty-handed.

  Partly because of Van Buren’s growing friendship with anti-Clinton Federalists like King, and partly because of the rising sophistication of his methods, the Bucktails were poised to make great gains in 1820, a year after his nadir. They had held their first caucus as a separate party in 1819 and ran well against the Clintonians, aided by the press organs they had founded. In 1821, Van Buren ran for the U.S. Senate and won a difficult victory. That same year, his allies swept into the state council of appointment, which controlled the patronage of New York, and cherry-picked jobs for their supporters. The tide was turning.

  But there was one last piece of unfinished business that Van Buren needed to make his mastery of New York complete. The state constitution, written in 1777, was woefully inadequate for the changing times, and a number of its archaic features favored Clinton’s autocratic style of government—particularly the power of appointment. The Bucktails proposed a constitutional convention to rewrite it, and the public voted its approval. Beginning on August 28, 1821, the convention dramatically rewrote the rules of New York government, enlarged the suffrage from 100,000 to 260,000, reduced the governor’s tenure from three to two years, reformed the patronage and judiciary systems, and generally accepted the idea that parties can govern more efficiently than individuals. These were heady changes, but as Van Buren said, “That which ought to be done ought to be done quickly.”

  Van Buren was not the author of all of these changes, nor did he go along with all of them. He was generally moderate, steering between extremes of conservatism [“some dozen hare-brained politicians”] and radicalism [“a small number of Mad-caps”] as the new order was forming. One of his more famous sayings dated from this time—that government should not be guided by “temporary excitement” but by the “sober second thought” of the people. But there was no doubt about who was in command, and who was the principal beneficiary of the new system that was forming. The changes were not perfect—and notably, they did not do much to extend the vote to black freemen (Van Buren fought those who would deny blacks the vote, but he went along with a requirement that they own $250, which removed many of them from the rolls). But the new constitution loosened up a sclerotic system so that it could cope with the rapid pace of the times, and in a sense it gave the vote not only to the people who suddenly received it in the 1820s, but to all those who would receive it every time the suffrage was enlarged. The New York Constitutional Convention established a vital principle around the nation: the democracy created on the Fourth of July was fluid, not static. The Revolution continued.

  As he prepared to go to Washington, Van Buren could look back on a decade of extraordinary political growth. From his election as state senator in 1812, he had quickly established himself in Albany, tangled with the Magnus Apollo and won more often than he lost. He had helped save New York’s honor during the dark days of the War of 1812. He had met the supporters who would follow him up and down the mountain over the next two decades. And he had forever changed the way the people of his state governed themselves.

  Even more profoundly, Van Buren had laid the foundation for what would become Jacksonian Democracy in only a few short years. With his ideas about party discipline, c
ommunications, and enlarged suffrage, he had shown other like-minded individuals how to take democracy beyond the periwigs of the eighteenth century. His ascent in New York coincided perfectly with New York’s emergence as the most important state in the Union. Everyone knew that New York City was growing rapidly. Whoever controlled New York’s electoral votes would have more and more to say about who became president. The Kinderhooker had become a kingmaker.

  * * *

  Van Buren’s rival De Witt Clinton had done well over the same ten years, and deservedly received accolades for the Erie Canal, nearing completion in 1821 (finished in 1825). But in truth, it was the Dutchman whose future stretched far over the horizon. Now, in 1821, Van Buren’s work in New York was done. The Regency would govern his native state for him while he was away. It was time to turn to the rest of the country.

  3

  Democracy

  As the newly elected senator Van Buren wended his way toward Washington, there were precious few reasons to expect that he would enjoy the same success that he had found in New York politics. At home, a Byzantine in Byzantium, he had deciphered the local bureaucracy and prevailed against formidable enemies. But the national stage was vast, unfamiliar, and unforgiving. Those who dominated it possessed qualities that were foreign to him—stentorian voices, aristocratic noses, generous estates. His talents, at first glance, would seem more congenial to the House of Representatives than to the Roman Senate. But once again he would trump the cynics. Within seven years, he created the modern Democratic Party, anointed Andrew Jackson as its standard-bearer, and revolutionized American politics forever.

  Van Buren arrived in Washington on November 5, 1821. Within a few hours of his arrival, as if the political weather had already changed, he received his first visit, from an operator every bit as skillful as he—John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the secretary of war. Their meeting was friendly, and soon Van Buren was playing whist with the great Southron and his friends. Calhoun, already casting an eye on the White House, was transparently hoping to use Van Buren to advance his presidential hopes. But for all their pretended friendliness, something intangible separated them—party doctrine, perhaps, or simply the fact that each was there blocking the other. Despite periodic alliances, they would never trust each other, and in that distrust were planted the seeds of the great sectional tensions that would engulf the Union four decades later. Failing to become great friends, they instead became mortal enemies.

  Washington was hardly the seat of an empire in 1821. Nothing proclaimed that fact quite as vividly as the scorch marks on the White House from its immolation in 1814. Farther down Pennsylvania Avenue, the Capitol lurched upward, ungainly and unfinished, its incompletion an apt metaphor for the nation it symbolized. Washington was no Rome—it contained a grand total of 23,000 people, and a disconcerting number of them (7,000) were enslaved. A traveling Englishman called it “the most forlorn and melancholy place, bearing the value of a capital, I ever was in.”

  But tawdriness was never a problem for the now-elegant Van Buren, who moved easily in his new surroundings and made friends quickly. His reputation as an arch-politician preceded him, and his messmate Rufus King predicted that “within two weeks Van Buren will become perfectly acquainted with the views and feelings of every member, yet no man will know his.” Unfortunately, there was a setback with his maiden speech in the Senate. Ambitiously, he chose a topic that had nothing to do with New York—a Louisiana land transaction—as if to show that he was no mere hick from upstate New York, and the fact that it dealt with issues of false titles must have brought him back to his early days arguing on behalf of the small farmers of Kinderhook. But with all of Washington watching, disaster struck. Van Buren launched his campaign for political supremacy by giving what may have been the worst debut performance in the history of the Senate. He suffered a “break down,” in his own words, lost his way in the speech, and sat down confused and humiliated—a feeling that any high-school elocutionist will instantly recognize. In his memoir, not exactly the most readable political document ever written, he was unusually moving when describing this moment, confessing that for all his success, he had never been free from great “timidity” and “embarrassment” in his public speaking. But it seemed to matter very little. As his adversary taunted him, Van Buren rediscovered his voice in a fit of anger, and ultimately won the debate. Before long, he was comfortable in the Senate, and especially with the Old Republicans who still felt loyal to the ancient ideals of Thomas Jefferson, somewhat dimly remembered as the third decade of the nineteenth century opened. Soon Van Buren was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and well on his way to reinventing the political system.

  Those who knew him well could verify that this had been his secret ambition from the start. An unpublished diary by a New York acquaintance, Charlemagne Tower, records Van Buren as saying privately that he planned to “revive the old contest between the federals and the anti-federals and build up a party for himself” In his correspondence, he admitted that his great goal was the “resuscitation of the old democratic party,” using the same techniques he had learned in Albany on the national stage. It was a shockingly audacious plan, especially coming from a first-year senator. And while it was couched in careful Jeffersonian language, what Van Buren had in mind was nothing less than the organization of a new party, unprecedented in power and reach.

  Progress was slow at first. Van Buren got into some early patronage squabbles with the Monroe administration, which exacerbated the distrust he already felt toward the president. His tidy Dutch mind hated the disorderliness of the national political scene in the early 1820s. Great changes were in the air, and it was becoming obvious that George Washington’s fantasy of a single party was inadequate for the governance of what was no longer a simple rural republic. The argument over the admission of Missouri had revealed just how deep feelings ran over slavery, both North and South. Economic and diplomatic policies changed as you traveled over the map. Dozens of personality cults had grown in Washington—little cabals dedicated to electing their leaders to higher office and willing to stop at nothing to do it.

  Van Buren yearned to impose some order on this mess. In particular, he distrusted Monroe, who claimed to be a Republican, but had too many former Federalists around him for Van Buren’s taste. New York’s new senator felt strongly that the party was being weakened, not strengthened, by this “fusion policy,” and that everything it once stood for was being watered down by aimless “amalgamation.” This was political déjà vu—for Van Buren had run the same campaign against De Witt Clinton in New York, when he transformed the upstart Bucktails into the Regency by drilling into them the great value of party regularity. Once again, he set to work, building alliances, emphasizing the need for a disciplined platform, and using his base in New York to command respect from all parts of the Union—especially from the large flock of presidential aspirants craving New York’s electoral votes.

  Will Rogers once said, “I don’t belong to an organized party—I’m a Democrat.” But, in fact, organization is precisely what distinguished the proto-party that Van Buren was forming. Far beyond anything that had existed before, Van Buren envisioned a national structure, tethered together by speedy communications and tight message control, that would unite the aspirations of “the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North.” It was the Regency reanimated—only on a far bigger scale. From across the Union, the people would be connected by alert local committees reporting to their state chairmen, but, just as importantly, by the novel sense that politics was a participatory ritual, gaudy and fun. It took a tavernkeeper’s son to figure out that the American people actually like being with each other.

  We have grown so complacent with the idea of two-party democracy that we still fail to grasp its revolutionary power. There is nothing in the Constitution about opposition parties and, in fact, the Founding Fathers took great pains to express their horror for them. James Madison attacked “the violence of fac
tion” in Federalist 10 (though he was not above joining the first party squabbles of the 1790s), and George Washington, even more shrilly, denounced “the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party” in his farewell address. Considering how caustically the founders examined the European political universe, it is curious that they still could not see how naive their hopes for America were. They expected the United States to be a new kind of society, partyless, where democracy spread magically because great thinkers representing the people wished it so.

  Now, of course, we know differently, and evidence of opposition parties is one of the most important ways to measure the vital signs of an emerging democracy. Such parties normally appear well after a successful revolution, but they are no less crucial to the evolution of a civil society, as anyone from Zimbabwe, Cuba, or Hong Kong can confirm. Van Buren, while not a radical thinker, deserves full credit for realizing this truth ahead of his compatriots. It was a huge contribution, lost in the obscurity of the early republic, somewhere between the Erie Canal and the Tariff of Abominations, but more important than either. Not only is the spirit of party not hostile to democracy, it is essential to it. We are all familiar with the deficiencies of the two-party system—the acrimony, gridlock, and corruption that taint the process more than we care to admit. However, there is a fundamental balance at its core—an internal gyroscope, based on brute competition—that has allowed this system to continue, with only a few modifications, from 1828 to the present. That gyroscope was built by Van Buren, and every time we ask another country to replicate it, we are paying silent homage to him.