Martin Van Buren

by Ted Widmer

  Obviously, the growth of a large political machine, whirring and clanking across the Union, could be concealed for only so long. Opponents struggled for the right vocabulary to describe the entity that was coming into existence. The National Intelligencer, an influential newspaper, shrilly denounced these intrigues to create a “Central Junta” at the head of a new “cabbalistic organization.” Rush Limbaugh could hardly have said it better. In South Carolina, one wit wrote a fake advertisement: “Martin Van Buren, Cabinet maker and Joiner, No. 1 Albany street, New York, informs his friends and the public that he has with great labour and sagacity succeeded in the composition of a new Panacea” to treat “the most difficult disorders … in the system of political men.” Van Buren was either vilified or celebrated as the “Master Spirit” behind these changes, the “life and soul” of the movement, and inevitably as the “magician” who was ensorcelling influential leaders around the country. As the machine grew larger, its mechanic-in-chief loomed larger in the imaginations of his opponents, until Van Buren began to resemble one of the vaguely sinister scientists who populate so many gothic tales of the period.

  None of this activity was lost on President Adams, who could not have looked upon Van Buren’s activity with more disfavor if he was an emissary from the Vatican seeking to convert Yankee maids to Papism and then sell them into white slavery. In one of his most vituperative journal entries, he managed to disembowel Van Buren for reasons ranging from his parentage to his politics to Aaron Burr’s treason (the Adamses were nothing if not efficient—why write only one insult when three would get you so much more for your ink expenditure?).

  Van Buren is now the great electioneering manager for General Jackson, as he was before the last election for Mr. Crawford. He is now acting over the part in the affairs of the Union which Aaron Burr performed in 1799 and 1800; and there is much resemblance of character, manners, and even person between the two men. Van Buren, however, has improved as much in the art of electioneering upon Burr as the State of New York has grown in relative strength and importance in the Union. Van Buren has now every prospect of success in his present movements, and he will avoid the rock upon which Burr afterwards split.

  That was a prescient observation, and mixed some admiration with a generous dose of New England cynicism. In truth, Van Buren deserved the credit Adams gave him. The creation of the Democratic Party was the achievement of a lifetime, and too many biographers pass over these years to get to his presidency. If he had never been elected, he still would have been important for his guerrilla activity in the middle of the 1820s. He defeated more than an administration; he destroyed an entire system that had ossified and installed in its place something far more modern.

  Van Buren’s work was now nearly complete. Within the space of two short years, from roughly 1826 to 1828, he had built a political organization that would dominate American government until the Civil War, and would survive that conflict to become one of the two major parties of the twentieth century. We will never know exactly what he did, step by step, but whatever it was should be taught in business school. For the creation of the Democratic Party was an accomplishment worthy of the great economic empires that were under construction around North America at the same time: the Astor fur and real estate concerns, the mercantile firms swelling coffers in coastal cities, the textile factories churning out broadcloth in New England river valleys, and the enormous companies coming into existence to manage the raw materials coming out of the American West.

  Of course, he still had to win the 1828 election, and that meant deepening his relationship with the candidate at the top of the pyramid he was building. At first, Jackson and Van Buren were wary of each other—respectful, but hardly intimate. They had served in the Senate together, and each admired the other’s activities during the crucible of the second war against the British. But they were very different men, each a little suspicious of the other. Van Buren’s reputation as a magician preceded him wherever he went, and Jackson had not exactly shown fidelity to Jefferson’s original principles during his early political career. Yet there was much to unite them: a disdain for the Adams-Clay coalition, a visceral sense that wealthy interests should not receive special privileges, and, more than anything, a fierce desire to win. There was something else as well that may or may not have come up in private conversations, far from prying eyes: each had undergone, early in his career, a dangerous fascination with Aaron Burr. To this day we still do not know how close young Andrew Jackson came to throwing his lot in with Burr’s efforts to create an American empire outside the jurisdiction of the United States. Van Buren, one suspects, could relate to the spell that had hypnotized his candidate twenty years earlier.

  They drew closer as the election neared. In the fall of 1827, Van Buren wrote two interesting letters to Jackson, offering advice the way a parent would to a child (in fact Jackson was fifteen years older), urging him to leave the politics to the professionals and merely to appear presidential. It was not the last time that advice would be offered to a presidential candidate. But the letters grew longer in 1828. And their friendship deepened after the shocking death of De Witt Clinton in February. It had been mildly awkward that the old rivals Clinton and Van Buren were both in the Jackson camp. Now that Clinton was gone, it fell to Van Buren alone to deliver the Empire State, and with it the presidency. Van Buren delivered a moving eulogy to Clinton, perhaps the best speech he ever gave. Jackson’s great nineteenth-century biographer James Parton wrote that Clinton’s removal from the scene left Van Buren with a hand “full of cards,” all of them trumps.

  But politics never stops, and there were still a few thorny issues to work out before the election. One of the most sensitive was the tariff question—a matter that bitterly separated Northerners and Southerners, presaging in some ways the Civil War, though it was not ostensibly about slavery on the surface. A South Carolinian supporter wrote Van Buren that he was “treading on the crest of a lava not yet solid.” In December 1827 the Jackson coalition took over Congress, and Van Buren was forced to stare squarely at the problem. Through his reliable friend Silas Wright, he orchestrated a new tariff that spread benefits to different groups and brought together politicians representing Northern farmers and Southerners. Though deplored as the “tariff of abominations” by its opponents, particularly by Northern manufacturers who felt it gave too little protection, the tariff was an impressive example of Van Buren’s competence as a political manager and gave encouraging evidence that the Jacksonians would be a legislative force as well as a presidential party.

  In the spring of 1828, as the presidential excitement was heating up, Van Buren received pressure from his friends in Albany to return and run for governor of New York. It seems counterintuitive to a modern audience—why would he return to Albany? But as a hardened political operative, he could see the logic—his campaign would help ensure that New York went for Jackson, and it would shore up Van Buren’s credentials as an electable successor to the elderly general he was trying to install in the White House.

  He decided to do it—and after he sold his Washington furniture at auction, it was noticed that the carpet was threadbare in front of his mirror, from the thousands of times he had rehearsed his speeches to himself.

  Some of the glimpses we get of Van Buren during this campaign are markedly different from the staid figure who stares at us from his official portraits. As he canvassed the counties of western New York, he was resplendent in his outrageously colorful costume, dazzling voters with an outfit that showed how far he had come from Kinderhook. A pious churchgoer never forgot the impression: “His complexion was bright blond and he dressed accordingly. On this occasion he wore an elegant snuff-colored broadcloth coat, with velvet collar to match; his cravat was orange tinted silk with modest lace tips; his vest was of pearl hue; his trousers were white duck; his silk hose corresponded to his vest, his shoes were Morocco; his nicely fitting gloves were yellow kid; his hat, a long-furred beaver, with broad brim, wa
s of Quaker color.” Van Buren planned a campaign for Jackson that was no less uproarious, and across the Union there were deafening parades, gaudy souvenirs, and drunken songs without end. The dour Adams never had a chance.

  The election offered a sweet reward for all the long years Van Buren had put into his cause. Jackson won by a huge margin, drawing support in every region except New England. Van Buren, too, was easily elected as governor. In his inaugural address, delivered in January 1829, he showered unusual attention on the new kinds of modern problems that were beginning to afflict New Yorkers—urban problems like juvenile delinquency, economic problems like bank regulation, and election reform. Nearly exactly a century later, in the same place, Franklin D. Roosevelt would inaugurate his gubernatorial career with another policy-driven address.

  Yet Van Buren would not remain governor for long. As Jackson formed his cabinet, it was obvious that he would consult with the adviser who had done so much for him. A month later, Jackson offered him the most prestigious position that was in his power to give: secretary of state. Van Buren was hardly an expert in international affairs, and some of his most strident speeches against John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay had deployed a rather cheap isolationism against their administration. But there was far more to the position than an interest in the rest of the world, as anyone knew who lived in Washington. It offered the chance to continue at Jackson’s side, eminent beyond all others, and ultimately to compete for the presidency himself, after the single term that Jackson claimed he would serve. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, eminent beyond every other save one, for Vice President Calhoun (under Adams) had now become Vice President Calhoun (under Jackson)—the only time a vice president has succeeded himself under a different president. Both Calhoun and Van Buren had contributed mightily to the new alliance in power. But there were dark premonitions, as there always are with incoming administrations, far beneath the exuberance at the surface. James Buchanan wrote, “Disguise it as we may, the friends of Van Buren and those of Calhoun are becoming very jealous of each other.”

  Still, he had so much to feel proud of on the day that Jackson was inaugurated in March 1829, one of the great days in the history of participatory democracy. A tidal wave of humanity (twenty thousand strong) poured into Washington, eager to see the coronation of their champion, already called “the people’s president.” Some were exhilarated, but others likened the inaugural to “the inundation of the northern barbarians into Rome.” A society matron was horrified when she attended the reception at the White House, only to find “a rabble, a mob, of boys, negros, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping.” Jackson himself was “nearly pressed to death” by the frenzy of adulation and barely escaped to a nearby hotel. A fourteen-hundred-pound cheese sent by an admirer in New York was not only devoured by the rabble but so completely stomped into the carpets of the White House that the stench lingered for weeks. Van Buren could not have asked for a more dramatic way to announce the new age. As his friend James Hamilton, Alexander’s son, wrote him, “Notwithstanding the row Demos kicked up, the whole matter went off very well.”

  Did Van Buren understand the full force of the power he had unleashed? A private notebook entry gives a clue:

  Those who have wrought great changes in the world never succeeded by gaining over chiefs; but always by exciting the multitude. The first is the resource of intrigue and produces only secondary results, the second is the resort of genius and transforms the universe.

  4

  Ascendancy

  It was a time for new beginnings and, paradoxically, a time of deep nostalgia for the past. In 1828, when the first major railroad in the United States, the Baltimore and Ohio, launched its service, an ancient signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll, was incongruously on hand to celebrate the advent of an age very different from his own. Likewise, Andrew Jackson was a peculiar choice to lead what was, in more ways than one, a political youth movement. At sixty-one, he was the oldest man to have been elected president. But he, too, had experienced the American Revolution firsthand (as several gruesome scars testified), and the crotchety old general was the perfect symbol for the unwieldy group of outsiders and backbenchers that had united around him to form the new Democratic Party.

  It is rather odd that the party’s architect was not there for Jackson’s riotous inaugural on March 4, having spent the better part of a decade planning for the day. But Governor Van Buren still had business to attend to in New York, and he did not come to the capital until March 22. For all the excitement he felt, there were already clouds on the horizon. Factions were forming in the new government (a friend wrote, “If I went into the Cabinet I would cut my throat”), and jealous office-seekers dogged Van Buren’s steps everywhere he went. He arrived in Washington after dark, only to find a horde of job applicants filling his hotel room. After an arduous hour entertaining their requests, he ventured to the White House to present his respects to the new president. Despite all that they had done together, this was the first time Jackson and Van Buren had met in person since forming their alliance. More than two decades later, Van Buren remembered the moment vividly and gave his tedious memoir more life than usual: “A solitary lamp in the vestibule and a single candle in the President’s office gave no promise of the cordiality with which I was, notwithstanding, greeted by General Jackson on my visit to the White House.” Jackson, although unhealthy and depressed by his wife’s recent death, greeted his exhausted visitor with a warmth he was not expecting. It was the beginning of a most unusual political friendship, and “from that night to the day of his death the relations, sometimes official, always political and personal, were inviolably maintained between that noble old man and myself, the cordial and confidential character of which can never have been surpassed among public men.”

  They had their work cut out for them. Each had scored a great personal triumph—Jackson in finally achieving the presidency, Van Buren in building the platform for him to stand on. But it was one thing to form an opposition; it was quite another to govern. And in the act of opposing, they had of course created a few opponents of their own. Again, the Regency offered a model of how to move forward and consolidate the gains they had made—through patronage, press, and close liaisons with Congress.

  Over time, the Jacksonians would excel in all three areas. The number of federal employees roughly doubled, to sixty thousand, and a huge number of sympathetic officeholders were brought in (a Regency lieutenant, William Marcy, had won both critics and admirers for stating honestly, “To the victor belong the spoils”). But it was rough going at first. Van Buren, who prided himself in his sensitive handling of appointments, was hurt by a number of early blunders that were made without his input, including inappropriate appointments in New York and in the foreign service, both technically under his supervision. One night he walked the streets of Washington “until a late hour,” wondering whether to submit his resignation as secretary of state the next day. He was also put off by the number of strong personalities clustered around Jackson, each expecting attention and influence. The Democratic Party, still in its infancy, was a stool with three legs. There were Westerners that Jackson had brought in, Southerners under the sway of Calhoun, and Old School Jeffersonians around Van Buren, including Virginians and New Yorkers. But no group had a monopoly, and that only exacerbated the jockeying for position. Over time, a small, core group of advisers would emerge, including at various times Van Buren, John Eaton, Amos Kendall, and Francis Preston Blair. This Kitchen Cabinet, as it was called, would prove to be a great comfort to Jackson, but it took time to coalesce.

  Calhoun presented a particularly thorny problem. To this day, it’s intimidating even to stare at a daguerreotype of the fierce South Carolinian. Imagine what it was like to become the focal point of his wrath. For nearly a decade, since the day he welcomed Van Buren to Washington, he had watched the New Yorker creep up on him. It was insulting enough that Van Buren had torpedoed his chances for th
e presidency in 1824, when Calhoun was the rising star of a new generation; now Van Buren was a rival in his own right. Any sapient student of American economic trends—as Calhoun surely was—could tell that New York’s strength was increasing with the Erie Canal, and that the South would lose influence if special measures were not taken to protect it. For each of these reasons, Calhoun reorganized his priorities as the Jacksonians came to power. The former nationalist became an ardent sectional champion, responding to the Tariff of Abominations in 1828 (“northern perfidy”) with his Exposition and Protest, which advanced the dangerous idea that a state could nullify any federal law it disliked. And the once-generous politician became extraordinarily sensitive to Van Buren’s rise and to the problem that simmered below the surface of their enmity—slavery. It was the beginning of a long slide—what often happens to powerful Washington insiders who believe they should be president.

  Despite the early slights, Van Buren wisely kept his counsel, and his friendship with Jackson grew incrementally from the moment of his arrival. To this day, one wonders a little: Who was using whom? Yet they seem to have felt genuine affection for each other, and for long stretches of his presidency Jackson valued Van Buren’s advice above all others’. Van Buren’s enemies were driven to distraction by their obvious closeness. John Quincy Adams destested their “political love-potions.” Davy Crockett wrote, with his usual bluntness, “Van Buren is as opposite to Jackson as dung is to a diamond.”

  One reason for their friendship is precisely the fact that they were so different. Like connecting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, each offered something the other lacked. Jackson, famously short-tempered, did not always foresee the long-term consequences of his tantrums. There was something terrifying about his anger, and more than a few widows in Tennessee regretted that their late husbands had made disparaging remarks within his earshot. Jefferson once wrote, “When I was President of the Senate and he was a Senator, he could never speak on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly and as often choke with rage.”