by Ted Widmer
Some of the pressures ginning up the slavery debate were in fact extrinsic to the United States—though just barely. In 1836, Americans living in Texas—then a province of Mexico—declared an independent republic and almost immediately sought to join the Union. Andrew Jackson had championed the acquisition of Texas, but Van Buren was far less enthusiastic, knowing that the arrival of this much potential slave territory would inflame the North. After becoming president, he delayed full recognition for months, and then delayed Texan demands for annexation as well. Both sides were angry—John Quincy Adams saw in Van Buren little more than Jackson’s expansionism “covered with a new coat of varnish,” while Southerners denounced Van Buren for his timidity. Jackson wrote edgy letters to his successor, demanding stronger action and crossing well beyond the bounds of postpresidential propriety.
Van Buren offered more satisfaction to the South as he pursued a different Jacksonian legacy. Throughout his presidency he continued the brutal Indian removals that had freed up vast quantities of land in Jackson’s Southwest. Thousands of Cherokees were forced to march along the “Trail of Tears” from Georgia to Oklahoma, and the Seminoles in Florida were violently hunted down (their leader Osceola was tricked into capture with a false flag of truce). Van Buren dwelt in the lying pieties of the day when he reported to Congress that the government’s treatment of the Indians had been “directed by the best feelings of humanity.” One of his favorite nieces, an insubordinate teenager, told him she hoped he lost the election because of what he and Jackson had done to the natives.
But as he placated the South, Northerners began to feel that this hypocrisy and violence, in both Florida and Texas, was connected by an invisible thread to the great Slave Power that seemed to dictate policy from Washington. Thirty years later, as he reviewed the causes that had led to the Civil War, the Massachusetts theologian Theodore Parker wrote, “Slavery was using the Union as her catspaw—dragging the Republic into iniquitous wars and enormous expenditures, and grasping empire after empire thereby.”
Renewed pressures to gag discussion of slavery in Congress were also causing strain. In the fall of 1837, as Van Buren was straining to repair the economy, Congress took up a long debate over slavery in the district. Calhoun, having relinquished his designs on the White House, had emerged as the chief defender of the Southern Way, and that December he presented six resolutions that defended the peculiar institution in stronger language than Congress had ever heard. Most Democrats in the Senate supported him, implying that the White House approved. In the House, former president John Quincy Adams was equally active, denouncing slavery in speech after speech, and earning lasting fame in his final incarnation as “Old Man Eloquent.” It was a sign of how volatile the debates in Congress were that a duel ensued between Representatives Jonathan Cilley of Maine and William Graves of Kentucky. Cilley was killed, and Washington was plunged into deep mourning. Nathaniel Hawthorne, a college friend of Cilley’s, wrote a stinging eulogy in the Democratic Review, essentially accusing the Slave Power of killing him.
To appreciate the full import and the even fuller strangeness of the slavery debates roiling Congress, it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the man who was presiding over the Senate as the chief representative of the administration. Van Buren’s vice president, Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky, had made his career as an Indian fighter—alleged to have killed Tecumseh—and was a loyal Democrat. Like Jackson and Van Buren, he had fought against debt imprisonment and was popular with Northern workers. He didn’t care too much for ceremony, or comb his hair, and Harriet Martineau wrote, “If he should become President, he will be as strange-looking a potentate as ever ruled.” But the most striking fact in his personal background, an open secret in Washington, was his unusual domestic arrangement: Johnson was living openly with and was probably married to one of his slaves.
Early in his life, Johnson had fallen in love with a woman named Julia Chinn, a mulatto whom he inherited from his father. By her he had two striking daughters, Imogene and Adaline, and he treated all three as his family members, seating them at dinner with guests and traveling publicly in a carriage together. Johnson paid for his daughters’ tutoring “until their education was equal or superior to most of the females in the country,” and his wife ran his estate during his long absences on government business. But for all these progressive ideals, Johnson’s attempt to integrate his family with local society failed, and a local newspaper article reported hauntingly that “they never circulated among the whites.”
Julia died of cholera in 1833, but Johnson found a new consort, described in a remarkable letter from Amos Kendall to President Van Buren in 1839, recounting a visit to Johnson’s “watering establishment” in Kentucky. Kendall was amazed not only by the vice president’s happiness “in the inglorious pursuit of tavern keeping,” but that he was spending time in the presence of “a young Delilah of about the complection of Shakespears swarthy Othello,” “said to be his third wife … some eighteen or nineteen years of age and quite handsome.” If anything had happened to Van Buren during his presidency, this young African-American woman would have become the first lady of the United States—if the nation could have withstood the shock, which of course it could not have.
The truly remarkable aspect of this story, obviously, is not that it happened but that Johnson was so honest about it. That masters were forcing themselves on their slaves was hardly a secret—the South Carolina novelist William Gilmore Simms, a prominent defender of slavery, wrote in 1838 that one of slavery’s great benefits was that it allowed men to “harmlessly” vent their lust on their slaves. But because Johnson chose love over lust, the South despised him. His great crime was that he refused to be a hypocrite, and for that he paid a severe price.1 Van Buren’s Southern supporters, including Jackson, tried to remove Johnson from the ticket in 1840, but Van Buren resisted, adding to the strain that was developing between the old friends as the slavery debate deepened and they felt themselves instinctively to be on opposite sides of the divide. When Johnson finally died in 1850, his brothers forced a local court to issue a document proclaiming that he had never had children.
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There were hundreds and thousands of other incidents that deepened America’s racial worries during Van Buren’s four years in office, most of which have vanished from the history books, but which show plainly a nation on a course to conflict. Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838, making his way from Maryland to Massachusetts, where he launched one of the most remarkable careers of the nineteenth century. In 1840, a naval court-martial case in North Carolina resulted in the conviction of an officer who had flogged his sailors, but it hit a snag because some of the witnesses were black and their testimony was illegal in that state. When Van Buren upheld their right to testify in a naval case, the South was furious.
Much better, from the Slave Power’s perspective, and much worse from our own, was Van Buren’s performance during the celebrated Amistad case. In 1839, slaves had revolted and taken control of the schooner Amistad off Cuba. Attempting to return to Africa, they had instead landed at Long Island, and they were soon imprisoned in Connecticut. Van Buren issued an executive order demanding that the slaves be taken to a naval vessel, to hasten their return to their Spanish owners, but the case ground its way slowly through the courts. Finally, in the last days of the Van Buren administration, in February 1841, the seventy-three-year-old John Quincy Adams delivered a stirring defense of the slaves before the Supreme Court, winning their freedom and his glory. An abolitionist wrote that Van Buren’s executive order ought to be “engraved on his tomb, to rot only with his memory.”
About the worst thing that can happen to your reputation is to be cast as the villain in a popular Steven Spielberg film. Undeniably, Van Buren’s actions in the Amistad case deserve censure. But it is difficult to imagine any president between John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln acting differently, and it helps to understand that Van Buren was fighting seve
ral difficult battles at the same time. Without Southern support in 1840, Van Buren had no chance to pass his economic program, recover from the Panic of 1837, or win reelection. As I hope I have made clear, he was not consistently pro-slavery and often enraged the South with his tacit support for certain African-American rights. In 1848, he would go quite a bit further.
Still, it was obviously too little too late, or perhaps it was all just too soon. Decades later, one of Van Buren’s biographers, the son of his old law partner, reminisced about the extraordinary crowd of Van Buren loyalists, mostly upstate New Yorkers, who had first seized control of the state and then the federal government for a few exciting years, before the South had reasserted control. In particular, he remembered a searing incident from that time, the heartbreaking story of an African-American government employee whose wife, a slave, killed their children after they were taken away and sold illegally. The author, William Allen Butler, then concluded with an interesting statement: “This was surely enough to make us all Abolitionists at heart, and such, I think, we all became.”
That statement should be taken with a grain of salt, but still it offers a correction to the kneejerk way in which most people dismiss Van Buren as a stooge of the South. In the long run, neither his pro-slavery nor his anti-slavery actions were enough to forestall the defenestration that just about everyone in the United States knew was coming. Van Buren approached the intensifying debate over slavery the way that most politicians do—he danced around it, trying to placate people and offering various concessions to maintain his support. That philosophy works with the money and patronage issues that constitute the vast bulk of what passes for politics. But once in a great while, a cause will assume so much moral weight that it simply refuses to go away, and if a politician does not treat it with the seriousness it deserves, it destroys him. Lyndon Johnson discovered that in Indochina, and Van Buren’s experience wrestling with slavery was not entirely dissimilar. The more he tried to hold the pieces of the Union together, the more they fell from his grasp. There was simply no center left for him to stand on, and without a center Van Buren was lost. By failing to take a stronger stand, the greatest politician of his generation had checkmated himself.
As he looked ahead to the 1840 election, there were already ominous signs. In New York, as Van Buren was acutely aware, antislavery Whigs were making great headway. Elsewhere, the two-party system was losing some of its sway, and abolitionists were launching a new Liberty party—a distant ancestor of the Republicans. Ultimately, it would take a new visionary to smash the system, as he had done, and build something better in its place. At the margins of the United States, a young political genius, even poorer than Van Buren had been, was giving his first speeches, exhorting the citizens of Illinois to build a government more truly worthy of themselves.
7
Chicanery
If Van Buren was beset by more than ordinary problems, he also drew on more than ordinary resources. His presidency may seem abbreviated and remote today, and to most Americans those four years in the 1830s might as well be pre-Columbian for all of their relevance to the bustling United States of the twenty-first century. After all, people were shorter then, and they built quaint structures whose inscriptions we do not always understand.
Still, the presidency is the presidency. Each of those years was as long, and felt as current, as any we have lived through before or since. Van Buren may have experienced more than his share of difficulty, but it would be a mistake to assume that he did not relish the role that he had prepared for since he was a young man.
His arrival in the White House in 1837 had signaled an exciting shift in the winds of Washington. While there was no doubt that he was Jackson’s political heir, it was equally obvious that he was a very different person, and that social life in the capital would adjust accordingly. To begin with, he was much younger, a fact he trumpeted in his inaugural address: “I belong to a later age.” There was something to the claim—Van Buren was the first president who was technically American, and not the bastard offspring of the British Empire. After his ascendancy, the nineteenth century was far more palpably in the air than during Jackson’s tenure, with its royal mood swings and petty court disputes. The shift northward was also felt in the capital, and New Yorkers in particular were proud that one of their own occupied the executive mansion.
It would be an egregious exaggeration to call the Van Buren White House “Camelot,” but the president’s relative youth and affability quickened the pace of the capital. Four presidential sons entered the pool of eligible bachelors, and John Van Buren in particular showed an affinity for the role. “Prince John,” as he was called after a celebrated dance with the young Queen Victoria, charmed men and women alike and was beginning to earn notice as a skilled politician in his own right. As mentioned earlier, Abraham Van Buren married a Southern belle, Angelica Singleton, to great acclaim in 1838. After returning from their honeymoon, they moved into the White House, where she took up the role of hostess with great zeal—perhaps too much zeal, for she enjoyed standing on a dais to receive her visitors, surrounded by female friends all dressed in white. Martin, Jr., was his father’s principal secretary, and the two of them spent many nights together at dinner parties around Washington. Van Buren broke precedent by accepting invitations from cabinet members and prominent members of the opposition, restoring the broken link between the White House and Washington society. Even the dour John Quincy Adams was impressed, recording in his journal his guilty pleasure at staying too late at one party and returning with the two Van Burens in a carriage.
Large receptions were held at the White House as well—five thousand people came to his first formal open house in the spring of 1838. James Silk Buckingham described crashing a reception for three thousand, and coming away rather impressed by both the size and simplicity of American entertainments.
The president received his visitors standing, in the center of a small oval room, the entrance to which was directly from the hall on the ground floor. The introductions were made by the city marshal, who announced the names of the parties; and each, after shaking hands with the president, and exchanging a few words of courtesy, passed into the adjoining rooms to make way for others. The president, Mr. Van Buren, is about 60 years of age, is a little below the middle stature, and of very bland and courteous manners; he was dressed in a plain suit of black; the marshal was habited also in a plain suit; and there were neither guards without the gate or sentries within, nor a single servant or attendant in livery anywhere visible.… Everyone present acted as though he felt himself to be on a perfect footing of equality with every other person.
Not long after, the same writer recorded seeing Van Buren in church at St. John’s:
The president walked into the church, unattended by a single servant, took his place in a pew in which others were sitting besides himself, and retired in the same manner as he came, without being noticed in any greater degree than any other member of the congregation, and walking home alone, until joined by one or two personal friends, like any other private gentleman. In taking exercise, he usually rides out on horseback, and is generally unattended, or, if accompanied by a servant, never by more than one. Everywhere that he passes he is treated with just the same notice as any other respectable inhabitant of the city would be, but no more.
But this informality did not mean he did not take his public responsibilities seriously. Van Buren upgraded the White House soon after his arrival, improving its plumbing and installing a crude version of central heating. To maintain his reputation as a generous host, he presided over lavish dinners as well. A Maine politician, John Fairfield, wrote a mouthwatering account to his wife, describing a meal that began with soup and continued with fish, turkey, beef, mutton, ham, pheasant, and a game bird that Fairfield could not pronounce (were there any edible animals left that he had not already mentioned?). Desserts included ice cream, jelly, almonds, raisins, apples, and oranges. These were not teetotaling events,
either; liquid refreshment was plentiful, as it was throughout the early republic, in quantities that would stagger the more delicate political sensibilities of the twenty-first century.
The same generosity of spirit extended to the guest list. Van Buren was no stuffed shirt and enjoyed spending time with younger, creative people. Despite his lack of education, he was a far more versatile reader than Jackson, and from the outset his administration lent support to writers in the meager ways that it could. Many were encouraged to publish in the administration’s literary organ, the Democratic Review, ably edited by John Louis O’Sullivan. An impressive number received jobs in the Van Buren administration, from the historian George Bancroft (who in turn hired Hawthorne and Orestes Brownson) to Washington Irving’s friend James K. Paulding. Henry Longfellow was a Whig, and therefore could not support Van Buren, but he, too, felt welcome in the White House, and described an amusing visit in which Van Buren refused to divulge any political information: “We talked about the weather, the comparative expense of wood and coal as fuel, and the probability that as the season advanced it would grow milder!”
For all the problems occasioned by the Panic and the growing rift over slavery, these were exciting times for young intellectuals. After Emerson’s call for a native body of expression independent from “the courtly muses of Europe,” new writers answered the call, encouraged by the rapid pace of innovation in printing and the efflorescence of new newspapers and magazines. The popular hunger for political news that Van Buren helped to create—the sense that Whig-Democrat battles were a kind of spectator sport—helped writers and reporters eager to get their names into print (and up-and-coming political managers like Horace Greeley, who used the press to acquire influence).
