Martin Van Buren

by Ted Widmer

  The Careful Dutchman, on the other hand, was a natural conciliator, and a gifted strategist who could convert Jackson’s pathological urges into meaningful policy. He also made Jackson laugh, and the president was convinced that his favorite newspaper humorist was secretly Van Buren. Before long, they had grown close, and Van Buren was spending considerable time at the White House, eating, drinking, and even, according to one source, playing blindman’s bluff with the children of Jackson’s secretary. He was described as the president’s “constant riding, walking and visiting companion,” and Jackson went out of his way to defend Van Buren from the usual charges that he was an intriguer. Jackson, who detested guile and deception above all other things, claimed that Van Buren was “one of the most frank men” he knew—”a true man with no guile.” Either Van Buren’s enemies exaggerated his slyness, or he was very sharp indeed.

  For all their differences, they shared some important common traits. Neither was to the manor born, and the fact that Van Buren had been attacked so often in the press created a certain bond. Jackson had been through a searing experience in the 1828 campaign, denounced as a murderer and adulterer, and he was convinced that the death of his beloved wife, Rachel, stemmed from the attacks. Furthermore, both were widowers in a town where that meant something. Since Dolley Madison’s benign rule over Washington in the teens, a formidable force had been gathering strength in the capital—the influence of political wives. Nearly as soon as the British retreated, they advanced, and in the 1820s, as Washington became less an architectural sketch and more a genuine community, it was inevitable that these powerful spouses would feel their growing power over the destinies of the young republic. And they would advance their power through what passed for weapons of mass destruction at the time: gossip, innuendo, and outright slander. The historian Robert Darnton has brilliantly explored the power of gossip in pre-Revolutionary France—how pornographic bagatelles concerning Marie Antoinette eroded confidence in the monarchy, and whispered half-truths pitted rival factions against one another in court circles. Mud-soaked Washington was a long distance from Versailles, but the same eternal principles held. In one of the most memorable lines that he ever put on paper, Van Buren wrote, “You might as well turn the current of the Niagara with a ladies fan as to prevent scheming & intrigue at Washington.”

  All of these trends—the excitement of a new administration, the instability of the coalition, the Van Buren–Calhoun rivalry, Jackson’s temper, and the growing power of gossip—combined to lay the groundwork for the mother of all sex scandals, the Peggy Eaton affair. Has there ever been one that was not at heart political? Washington has a long history of high moral excitements—great upheavals that, once a generation or so, inflame the local rumormongers before they settle back into the Jurassic ooze of everyday social life. One thinks a little of Wilbur Mills, or Gary Hart, or the Lewinsky crisis, with its air of hyperbolic righteousness, and the swirling political currents secretly propelling events at the surface. Seemingly about nothing at first, the Eaton affair combined sex and politics to force a decisive power shift within the cabinet—in exactly the opposite direction than was intended.

  Peggy Eaton, the wife of Jackson’s close friend and secretary of war, John Eaton, had a long history of her own. She had grown up in the district—a claim not many could then make—as Peggy O’Neale, an attractive girl rising to maturity before all the world in her father’s boardinghouse. After having a few affairs (the precise number was in dispute), she married a young sailor when she was sixteen, but during his long absences she fell back into her old habits. Soon she was committing adultery with Eaton, then a prominent senator. After her husband died, she and Eaton were married at the beginning of 1829, just as the administration was forming. It was the talk of Washington society, and a friend of Van Buren’s wrote him in rapture, comparing Eaton’s ill-advised marriage to the act of using a chamber pot and then accidentally putting it on one’s head.

  This would hardly seem like a scandal worthy of the name today. No one was caught in flagrante delicto, and for all the negative attention they received, John and Peggy Eaton appear to have loved each other. Their beautiful town house lasted until the 1950s, when it was the Capitol Hill Club, exactly the kind of conservative bastion that their accusers would have felt comfortable in. But their timing in 1829 could not have been worse. Washington was not ready to accept a woman with Peggy’s past as a prominent political hostess (her crime may have been her low upbringing rather than her sexual indiscretion). As soon as the new administration began, a clique of cabinet wives, led by Calhoun’s, publicly snubbed Mrs. Eaton, refusing to visit her or to acknowledge her existence in any way.

  Jackson responded as one might expect: he completely flew off the handle. Reminded of the partisan attacks on his own wife (whose marriage to him overlooked a few legal niceties), Jackson took umbrage on behalf of Peggy Eaton and was soon utterly consumed by what Van Buren dubbed “the Eaton malaria.” Memorably, he said, “I had rather have live vermin on my back than the tongue of one of these Washington women on my reputation.”

  We will never know exactly what motivated Van Buren to defend Peggy—it could have been his acute nose for political advantage, or the fact that he had no wife, or maybe just his innate sense of justice. He knew a little about growing up in a tavern and having proper people look down on you—and must have instinctively responded to a logic that appears in her memoir: “I am not ashamed to say that I was born in the Franklin House and that my father was a tavern-keeper. I have always been superior to that petty American foolery.” Around the same time, his wealthy New York enemies were having a field day with the discovery of a letter Van Buren had written in which he complained, “My suffering is intolerable.” In any event, Van Buren did not merely tolerate her—he actively cultivated her friendship. This was hardly the act of a conniving schemer—it was a risky decision in an unforgiving political climate, and he did it in style, calling on Peggy as soon as he arrived in Washington. A remarkable sentence from a nineteenth-century historian conveys the drama of that first visit—a visit that reordered the cabinet and ultimately gave Van Buren the presidency: “The political history of the last thirty years, dates from the moment when the soft hand of Mr. Van Buren touched Mrs. Eaton’s knocker.”

  We can laugh at the melodramatic writing, but something rings true about that grandiose claim. Jackson never forgave Calhoun for his role in the Eaton affair, and never forgot his gratitude to Van Buren. The crisis brought out his best qualities, and John Quincy Adams recorded that the cabinet was badly divided between Calhoun, leading the “moral party,” and Van Buren leading the “frail sisterhood.” One could even argue that the Civil War sprang from Peggy Eaton’s peccadilloes—for Calhoun’s rage at Van Buren was just the beginning of a lifelong mania against Northern political power, and each crisis between 1828 and 1860 seemed to spring from the one immediately preceding it. In a sense, it’s all one story, and secession arguably resulted from succession—or, specifically, Calhoun’s failure to succeed Jackson. As early as December 1829, less than a year after taking office, Jackson had already privately designated Van Buren as his successor in an emergency.

  Part of the reason for this evolving trust was Van Buren’s successful administration of the State Department. Clearly, he enjoyed his new job for the simple fact that it was important. Friends predicted that he would divide his time between “international law and the ladies.” Unsurprisingly, this flattering smooth-talker was good at diplomacy, and before long he had resolved two major problems favorably, winning reciprocal trade benefits from the United Kingdom in the West Indies and securing a large payment of 25 million francs from France for indemnities dating back to Napoleon. He also successfully concluded the first treaty with the Ottoman Empire—an important agreement that laid the foundation for the modern alliance between the United States and Turkey. A visitor to the State Department left a florid description of Van Buren during this period: “a bald-headed, but whisk
ered little gentleman, dressed in the extreme of fashion, full of smirks and smiles, soft as the ‘sweet South, breathing o’er violets,’—but penetrating as a mercurial bath, or the poison of Upas.”

  Van Buren was also providing expert counsel to Jackson on a wide range of other matters. Most famously, he drafted an early version of Jackson’s Maysville Road veto, an important statement of just how far the federal government should go to support the internal improvements endlessly under construction in the booming United States. In a nutshell, he thought that truly federal projects—roads that stretched through many states—should be supported, but that local projects should be paid for locally. It was an important clarification of a murky issue, and smart politics as well, pleasing advocates on both sides of the issue.

  Calhoun, meanwhile, was growing more and more frustrated with his seemingly endless vice presidency. As he sensed Van Buren’s growing closeness to Jackson, an inner sense of physics pushed him away from both of them, and he began plotting his and South Carolina’s revenge. There was always an innate tension at the heart of Jacksonian democracy—between the old-school republicanism of Van Buren’s allies and the inchoate nationalism felt by Jackson. Nearly every major issue of the Jackson presidency touched on this fault line and forced Van Buren to find the middle ground he was so gifted at locating—keeping the government simple enough to please the Jeffersonian backers, but allowing the nation to grow fast enough to please Westerners and Northerners.

  In 1830, after the arguments over the Tariff of Abominations and the Eaton affair, Calhoun was ready to apply more pressure. That year saw the legendary Senate debate between Calhoun’s proxy, Robert Hayne, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a debate in which Webster forcefully asserted the primacy of the federal government over the states. In the near aftermath, a Jefferson Day dinner was proposed for April 13 at Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel in Washington, organized by Hayne. The planners innocently claimed that they wanted to bring Southern and Western Democrats together, but the dinner aroused Van Buren’s suspicions that Calhoun was plotting to undermine the party by spreading nullification. In this charged climate, Jackson and Van Buren decided to make a stand, and they planned a suitable response.

  Long-winded political dinners have been held in the capital since the dawn of the republic, but this one was truly memorable. At ten o’clock, after enduring dozens of toasts to Jefferson, Jackson stood up stiffly and raised his glass, staring fiercely at his vice president. With six words, he shattered the ambience that Calhoun had created: “Our Union: It must be preserved.” According to one observer, Calhoun’s glass “trembled in his hand” and “a little of the amber fluid trickled down the side.” Calhoun regained his composure, then spoke again in the code language that they both understood: “The Union—next to our liberty most dear.” At that moment of high drama, Van Buren offered the kind of conciliatory toast he was best at: “Mutual forbearance and reciprocal concessions: thro’ their agency the Union was established—the patriotic spirit from which they emanated will forever sustain it.” The three toasts would never be forgotten by anyone who attended the dinner, and rightly so. Calhoun was preparing to declare a kind of independence from the United States, and Jackson told him that the United States would not tolerate it. Van Buren’s friend Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri later concluded that the dinner was nothing less than a plot “to dissolve the Union.” Three decades later, Abraham Lincoln would remember the toasts well when he prepared to stand fast against South Carolina’s secession.

  * * *

  From the dinner, things only got worse for Calhoun. His next disaster came courtesy of William Crawford, the Georgian whom Van Buren had supported for president in 1824. Crawford never liked Calhoun and now wanted Jackson to know what the president already suspected. Twelve years earlier, in 1818, when Calhoun was secretary of war, he wanted to arrest and try Jackson for his bloody and almost certainly extralegal raids into Florida. Jackson and Calhoun now took their gloves off. Jackson accused Calhoun of “duplicity and insincerity.” Calhoun, in turn, published a scathing attack on Van Buren in the Washington newspaper he controlled. A paper loyal to Van Buren attacked Calhoun in return. The party was badly divided, and, despite all that he had done to cultivate the South throughout his career, Van Buren could now hear rumblings of discontent from below the Mason-Dixon Line.

  Though Van Buren had won the early rounds, the toxicity of the atmosphere bothered him, and he knew as well as anyone that status can change very quickly in Washington. As he wrestled with the problem, he conceived a plan that would lead to a new cabinet and preserve his hopes to succeed Jackson someday. Van Buren offered to resign, giving Jackson an opening to ask for the resignations of other cabinet members as well, including John Eaton, who had already caused so much unwitting damage, and several of Calhoun’s stooges. At first, Jackson recoiled from the plan, preferring as usual to meet all difficulties with stubborn resistance. But Van Buren wore him down, and ultimately he agreed. In gratitude, he named Van Buren to a post that he was sure to enjoy—minister to England. Calhoun presciently observed, with a mixture of jealousy and respect, that Van Buren had gained power while surrendering authority.

  Van Buren sailed for England on August 16, 1831, happy to enjoy “the quietude of a midsummer Ocean” after twenty years of unceasing political infighting. Each day carried him “further from the sight and the sound of the political strife,” and toward a position that he seemed to regard as part president-in-waiting, part Thomas Cook package tour. He was paid generously and was given a huge living expense, which he used to the last shilling. “Money—money is the thing,” he wrote in an early and accurate diplomatic assessment he sent back home. Like Joseph Kennedy a century later, his relatively precarious origins in America did not stop him for a second from enjoying all that English society had to offer. From the moment he arrived, he felt at home. He and his charismatic son John, acting as his assistant, met all the luminaries of London, including the royal family, who took a fancy to him. One friendship, in particular, diverted him—Washington Irving was the secretary of the American legation, and he was only too happy to squire the new minister and his son around the historic sights, liberally enjoying “old English hospitality,” probably a euphemism for the extraordinary variety of ales and beers that still greet travelers. They participated in a number of pagan Christmas revels—wassail bowls, mummers, boar’s heads, and the like, and Irving wrote, “The more I see of Mr. V.B. the more I feel confirmed in a strong personal regard for him. He is one of the gentlest and most amiable men I have ever met with.” Another evening Van Buren met the wily old French survivor Talleyrand, and they instinctively liked each other—one wishes their conversations could have been transcribed for the ages.

  But after a few months of these heavy responsibilities, Calhoun caught up to him. In February, as the Queen was holding her first drawing room of the season, word reached London that the Senate had rejected Van Buren’s appointment. Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, each with enough private reasons to thwart Van Buren’s career, had combined to deal the blow—and Calhoun had gleefully cast the deciding vote as president of the Senate. “It will kill him, sir, kill him dead,” he exulted to Thomas Hart Benton. Benton more accurately replied that Calhoun had “broken a minister,” but “elected a Vice-President.” The same boomerang effect that Van Buren had seen when the Regency fired De Witt Clinton was about to happen again, this time to his benefit. Reaction around the country was swift, and for nearly the first time in his life, Van Buren inspired a torrent of sympathetic outcries. Of course, he had not foreseen it—even Talleyrand could not have planned it this well—but there was no doubt that he was returning home with the enhanced status of a martyr, just as Jackson was casting about for a new vice president.

  Before returning home, Van Buren took care of some old family business, visiting the Netherlands to investigate his roots and contemplate the miracle of social possibility that America had wrought for his peasant ances
tors—ancestors who did not even have a proper last name when they first slouched toward the New World. Now, everywhere he went, he was a returning hero, the champion of international Dutchness and, some whispered, the future president of the United States. A very large step toward that end was taken back home, in Baltimore, when the first Democratic convention nominated Van Buren to replace Calhoun as Jackson’s vice president for the second term Jackson had said he would not seek.

  Van Buren returned on July 5, and as soon as he stepped off the boat, he must have realized his good fortune in having avoided American politics for a year. At exactly that moment, the Bank of the United States was trying to renew its charter and a new tariff was being coaxed through Congress. Both issues fell exactly on the fault line that was so troubling for the Jacksonians, between supporting the economy and avoiding intrusive government, and Jackson’s cabinet was predictably divided. A letter from Jackson was waiting for Van Buren the moment he arrived in New York, and he went straight to Washington, where he found a spectral Jackson determined to prevail in yet another mortal struggle. With his usual penchant for direct observation, the president put the matter simply: “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me, but I will kill it!” Three days later, Jackson issued his famous veto of the bank charter, denouncing policies that make “the rich richer and the potent more powerful.” The Bank’s director, Nicholas Biddle, howled, “It has all the fury of a chained panther, biting the bars of his cage.”