Martin Van Buren

by Ted Widmer

  Finally, the Panic is important because it empowered a kind of person who had never had much influence in American politics before. New York’s Locofocos and other radical Democrats suffered the most from the Panic and then gave Van Buren some of his most creative ideas, including the independent Treasury and a few modest initiatives to improve working conditions. This may not have added up to much, but it was a beginning, and showed that for the first time a president was thinking about the urban poor. In the twentieth century, the great historian Frederick Jackson Turner would claim that the origins of progressivism lay in the Van Buren administration.

  But for all these footnotes, it is clear that Van Buren’s presidency was badly damaged by the Panic. Vulnerable to begin with, thanks to all the enemies he had made in his climb up the mountain, he now had a target on his back. Unlike the hair shirts that other presidents were forced to wear—Teapot Dome, Watergate—Van Buren had little to do with his disaster, but it was attached to him all the same. Such is the fate of presidents, and deservedly so—they get the glory and the blame. Had he encountered no other problems, Van Buren might well have recovered. Unfortunately, the Panic was only the first of many disappointments in store for the overeager republic.

  Only ten years before Van Buren’s election, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had died on the same day, July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration. Sermons across the land proclaimed that a special providence was guiding America’s destiny, and it was hard at the time to refute the evidence. But now retribution was at hand. The Panic caused a terrible shock, both financially and, worse, psychologically. It drained confidence—that precious resource that Americans seem to drink in like oxygen. And the Panic was really only the surface manifestation of a huge number of other problems that suddenly were revealed in the harsher light that accompanies hard times. What had felt like effortless progress was badly interrupted in 1837. Everything Van Buren had worked to build—his party, his presidency, his reputation for political sagacity—was imperiled by the tsunami that struck at almost the exact moment he took office.

  6

  Shadows

  At first, the severe shock of the Panic obliterated the other issues on the presidential docket. Most presidents would have considered that plenty to work through. But even as the financial picture began to brighten, it became clear that there was no shortage of adversity facing President Van Buren and that many problems required the most delicate executive attention. Van Buren was used to hard challenges and prided himself on his reputation as a gifted fixer of crises that others could not solve or even foresee. But now that he was president, the problems seemed to multiply, as if the Panic were a Pandora’s box, forcing other types of anxiety out into the open. Financial vulnerability will do that to a nation or, for that matter, to a family—magnifying even the tiniest defect before the minute self-examination that accompanies economic failure.

  Suddenly, and for what felt like the first time in American history, Americans began to look with new skepticism at the national narrative, seeing a more complex portrait than Parson Weems’s bromides about George Washington. The United States was no longer a simple agricultural republic in 1837—it was a society of clashing economic interests, people moving in all directions, savage Indian removals, boatloads of immigrants, growing pockets of despair, and politicians who could barely speak to one another.

  The New Deal photography of the 1930s contains an unusual amount of contrast—striking areas of blackness next to brilliant sun-drenched objects in the foreground—aptly mirroring the shifting moods of the Depression. In a similar way, the problems of the 1830s cast long shadows over America. There is a darkness to Poe and Hawthorne, both emerging at exactly this moment, that cannot simply be explained by their fascination with the supernatural.

  One problem, of course, dominated all the others, and it too was brought uncomfortably into the sunlight by the Panic of 1837. Slavery was anything but a tiny defect. It was the most glaringly undemocratic idea in our history, so powerful that we are still wrestling with its legacy in the twenty-first century. But until Van Buren’s administration, it was largely invisible as a matter of public discourse. To be sure, it existed, and Americans knew of it. But it was not generally an issue in political campaigns or newspaper headlines or speeches on the floor of Congress. After the founders failed to resolve the slavery question, predicting that it would disappear naturally over time, it hardened into an impasse, with the South generally prevailing in its desire not to discuss the matter. All that was about to change.

  To visit the United States in the 1830s, as many foreign travelers did, was to see two Americas. North of the Mason-Dixon Line, visitors could marvel at all the signs of an aggressively entrepreneurial culture, wheezing and humming in the open air of the bustling nineteenth century. There were railroads, newspapers, cheap books, factories, and a culture of connectedness not too different from what the world feels now in the so-called age of globalization. Business depended on information and speed; all three depended on the railroad—the literal engine of capitalism.

  But if that same traveler peered across the invisible boundary separating North and South, he would see a very different world. Instead of machinery, human beings generated the power needed for the local economy to function. Instead of increasing openness and information, a small population of privileged landowners controlled all access to news and political power. Instead of democracy, feudalism prevailed—a feudalism based on race hatred. Visitors noticed, and Americans, always sensitive to foreign opinion, began to ask themselves what kind of country they aspired to be. And so, for this and other reasons, slavery came out from the shadows and into the daylight of American politics.

  The consensus not to regulate or even discuss slavery began to erode during Van Buren’s presidency, with profoundly destabilizing results that would ultimately smash the political edifice he had built. If the Panic had destroyed confidence in the economy, the slavery debates undermined the certainty that the Union was perfect and perpetual, as Jackson and Van Buren had said that memorable night in their toasts to Calhoun. Jackson, whose strong sympathy for slavery was well known, had kept the lid clamped tight on abolition. But the election of Van Buren threw a new spotlight on the growing slavery debate, in part because he was a Northern president, and in part because his own views on the subject were difficult to decipher—leading advocates on both sides to project their own feelings onto him, assuming he was on their side or, just as often, that he was in league with their opponents.

  In truth, it is difficult to pin down exactly where Van Buren stood on the topic. The answer depends very much on the year and the context in which he was forced to express his feelings. Throughout his career, he had a remarkable ability to absent himself from a contentious slavery vote just before it was called, and his private papers are surprisingly free of any reference to the issue—but perhaps that is not so surprising. Most Americans barely think of him in the context of slavery at all, or dismiss him as a spineless courtier of the South—the dastard portrayed in the 1997 film Amistad. But that is too shallow a first impression. It is truer to see the entire struggle taking place in microcosm inside him.

  There is certainly plenty of evidence to suggest that he favored slavery or, to be more precise, that he saw no reason to derail his political career with intemperate objections to it. From the beginning of his public life, going back to the War of 1812, he had pursued an ingenious Southern strategy, cultivating friends below the Mason-Dixon Line who could help him advance and whose enemies in New York were generally the same as his own. This was not merely a selfish decision, though it certainly facilitated his advancement. It was the accurate assessment of a master vote-counter, who understood instinctively that the South had to join him if he was going to succeed in building a new national party. Robert Caro’s brilliant study of Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious climb through the Senate portrays an equally sharp student of politics making the exact same calculus over a c
entury later.

  It is impossible to re-create the seminal conversation that took place between Van Buren and Jefferson in 1824, in the course of Van Buren’s pilgrimage to Monticello, but we can assume that slavery came up, since it was Jefferson’s obsession during the last decade of his life. Whenever Van Buren felt the need to shore up his credentials or to strengthen the reach of the party he was building, he took another extended trip through the Southern states. His reward was relatively little opposition to his selection as vice president and then president.

  Needless to say, Van Buren was disinclined to disturb these friends if he could avoid it. If his inaugural was the first to mention slavery—a modest step forward—it did so by promising that he would never tamper with it. Like most of his predecessors, he was a former slave owner himself (he had owned a slave named Tom, who ran away), a credential that separated him in an important way from the two other Northerners, both Adamses, who had held the presidential chair. His ties to the South became significantly more personal in November 1838, when his eldest son, Abraham, married Angelica Singleton, the daughter of a wealthy planter from South Carolina and the cousin of Dolley Madison. For the rest of his presidency, she would act as his hostess, cloaking all White House events with the magnolia scent of Southern hospitality.

  There is no doubt, whatever his private sympathies, that he did all he could to suppress the early spread of anti-slavery materials. As New York abolitionists began to take concerted action in 1835, on the eve of his presidential bid, he ordered his cronies to take measures against them, disrupting their meetings and preventing them from sending anti-slavery material through the mails. As petitions continued to flood Congress, Van Buren joined with the South in refusing to listen to them. The so-called Gag Rule proposed by Henry Pinckney of South Carolina ordered that all abolitionist tracts be tabled before they could be read—an outrageous violation of free speech. It passed the House in May 1836, exactly as Van Buren was launching his run, and he happily supported it. No abolitionists would stop him from getting to where he needed to go.

  That is the bulk of the evidence against Van Buren. But there is also some evidence to suggest that his personal feelings tended in the opposite direction. Despite all he did to shore up his Southern credentials, there was always a lurking fear among Southerners that Van Buren was secretly anti-slavery. Opponents pored over his voting record, looking with special fascination at his actions in the New York Constitutional Convention of 1821. During those debates, Van Buren had been characteristically moderate, advocating that African-Americans should vote if they possessed a certain amount of property (a requirement that disenfranchised most), but the South never lost its paranoia that Van Buren had advocated voting for blacks. In 1834, he was accused in Mississippi of seeking to emancipate the slaves by act of Congress, and rumors persisted that he was a closet abolitionist. Even Abraham Lincoln would play on these fears in an early debate against Stephen Douglas around 1840, arguing that Van Buren had gone too far to empower black Americans?

  In fact, what had worked so well for Van Buren was not that he ardently supported slavery, or that he fought it, but that he was perceived as a reasonable thinker who could bridge opposing points of view. No one elected from New York could have survived if he was perceived as the agent of another region’s interests. And no one knew New York better than Van Buren. But these middling sentiments began to work against him as the two sides of the slavery debate pulled apart, leaving the center difficult to hold. Van Buren’s timing had been exquisite during his rise to the presidency, but now fortune turned against him for a second time. First, the Panic had struck a death blow at his presidency. Now the slavery debate was turning acrimonious, making normal politics impossible.

  Why did the long conspiracy of silence, dating back to 1787, fall apart exactly as Van Buren inherited the presidency? To some extent, it was simply the right time. Sixty years had elapsed since the soaring claims of the Declaration of Independence had resonated around the world. In 1833, England had jolted the United States by freeing her slaves across the empire (an act that was completed in 1838). Even Mexico, behind the United States in so many ways, abolished slavery in 1829. Sometimes a mood changes quickly, as when Sputnik orbited above North America for the first time, or the Tet Offensive changed the tenor of the Vietnam War. Slavery simply grew more obvious and more odious in the late 1830s. Many Americans, aware that it was hypocritical to talk of slavery and freedom in the same breath, were no longer willing to avert their eyes and look in another direction.

  Part of the answer also lies in the word inherited. The struggle for Jackson’s succession had been unusually bitter and, like jealous siblings, Van Buren’s many enemies were not exactly eager to help him launch a new phase of Northern domination. The same demographic changes that thrilled foreign observers terrified Southerners, who were determined to resist the North’s growing political power. Two weeks before Van Buren’s inaugural, on February 18, 1837, Calhoun wrote, “I had no conception that the lower class had made such great progress to equality and independence. Such change of condition and mode of thinking on their part indicated great approaching change in the political & social condition of the country, the termination of which is difficult to be seen. Modern society seems to be rushing to some new and untried condition.”

  But there is more to it than broad historical trends. For several specific reasons, the South was alarmed about slavery in the 1830s. The decade had started inauspiciously with the savage Virginia revolt led by Nat Turner in 1831, whose killing spree had left fifty-five whites dead and had traumatized the entire region. It had gone from bad to worse as abolitionists began to organize in the North and to disseminate publications to a broad audience of indignant Americans. In a sense, this was a double insult to the South, attacking the peculiar institution upon which the Southern economy was based and flaunting high-tech printing technology to do it.

  The change did not happen overnight, and most Northern Democrats were still in the strange position of denouncing both slavery and abolition, believing that abolitionism was a form of fanaticism. But anti-slavery stock rose rapidly in the late 1830s, and each speech in Congress drove the wedge in deeper. Van Buren’s election fell precisely on all of these fault lines—between regions, between parties, and between degrees of belief that a Slave Power was secretly governing the United States. In other words, exactly as he became president in 1837, the great North-South coalition that he had built came under a dark cloud. In November 1837, an abolitionist printer, Elisha P. Lovejoy, was brutally murdered at his press in Alton, Illinois, by a pro-slavery mob. John Quincy Adams said that Lovejoy’s murder sent “a shock as of an earthquake throughout this continent.”

  Strong leadership was needed in this overheated climate, and Van Buren was in a tight spot. If he denounced slavery, half his party would walk out on him. If he did too much to coddle slavery, his home state would reject him. In 1837, there were 274 abolition societies in New York alone. He was left precariously trying to straddle two objects that were moving apart from each other. Neither was headed to the destination he wanted.

  Still, it’s important to point out that Van Buren showed some moments of character during a generally dispiriting time. His kindness toward one of his most vehement critics was a case in point. William Leggett was one of the best journalists in New York, a champion of the Democracy, workers’ rights, the Bank war, and many of Van Buren’s specific reforms—but an outspoken opponent of slavery and particularly the suppression of free speech relating to slavery, Around Van Buren’s election, he began to excoriate Van Buren for his coddling of the South and, shortly after, became seriously ill. Leggett was amazed when Van Buren responded by appointing him a diplomatic agent to Guatemala to improve his health. The cure did not succeed, but the act restored the faith of some of Van Buren’s Northern critics.

  But as this anecdote also reveals, Van Buren was losing some of his best supporters and weakening the moral imperative that had
helped to create the Democracy in the first place, when it had a claim on the affections of ordinary Americans who felt shut out of the political process. As the slavery crisis deepened in the late 1830s, Van Buren was badly caught in the crossfire. To some extent he was a prisoner of his own creation—for the heightened popular interest in the political world, inflamed by party machinery and political journals, now made it very difficult to flimflam one’s way out of a problem. The pleasant obfuscation that had made life bearable for politicians was no longer possible, owing to the strides in printing and transportation that made every politician’s speeches a matter of public record. In other words, it was impossible to lie in one location and then come home and deny that one had said such a thing.

  The central problem that now lay before him was brutally difficult: how to preserve the great Democratic coalition and move beyond the slavery debate, while assuring followers that “democracy” actually meant something, and that dissenting views were taken seriously; how to show people that America stood for meaningful ideals while, there in broad daylight, slaves were sold as chattel within shouting distance of Congress.

  In truth, there was something very wrong with Washington, D.C.—not just its slave markets but an ugliness that seemed to proceed from slavery and taint everything around it. Many travelers noticed it, and Americans winced at their descriptions. An English writer, James Silk Buckingham, lamented that here were found “persons of the least personal beauty, the plainest dresses, and the rudest personal manners that we had before remembered to have been congregated anywhere in America.” He did not remember “a single instance in which any literary or scientific topic was the subject of conversation,” and concluded, “There seemed, in short, united in the circles of Washington all the pretensions of a metropolis with all the frivolity of a watering-place, and the union was anything but agreeable.” Buckingham also disliked the moral climate of a city that was not neutral at all on the great question of the day, but very actively pro-slavery. He noticed with horror the newspaper advertisements for both slave auctions and runaway slaves, and recorded with disdain that a local performance of Othello had resulted in a newspaper editorial calling for the lynching of the playwright—although Shakespeare would not have been easy to catch.