by Ted Widmer
Yet expansion was enormously popular among a people straining for largeness in everything they did. It was the catnip of the 1840s, perfectly captured by the electric phrase “Manifest Destiny,” coined by Van Buren’s protégé John Louis O’Sullivan. From the Oregon territory to the Caribbean, Americans had an insatiable appetite for real estate, and a politician who failed to throw red meat out to the voters ran a real risk of being left behind. There was no doubt where Andrew Jackson stood on the great Texas question: he was foursquare behind it, and the publication of a letter stating that fact put a huge amount of pressure on Van Buren to once again follow Old Hickory.
By now the presumptive nominee, Van Buren had everything to gain and nothing to lose by issuing one of his famously noncommittal statements on Texas. Instead, he shocked political handicappers by stating in no uncertain terms that he was opposed to Texan annexation. In response to a query from a Mississippi congressman, William Hammet, Van Buren wrote out a reply on April 20 that reshaped the campaign and the known political universe for many years to come. Speaking a language that had not been heard before at the highest reaches of the Democratic Party, Van Buren argued that a naked land grab would harm America’s reputation for “reason and justice” and would almost certainly bring war with Mexico. He did not foreclose on the future possibility of accepting Texas under the right circumstances, but he could not agree to it at present, with Calhoun turning the question into a referendum on slavery and imperfect information flowing from the White House. It was a brave decision, and his supporters were enormously gratified. Silas Wright, the conscience of the Northern Democracy, wrote that he had never “felt more proud.”
His enemies were probably just as delighted. Immediately after the publication of the Hammet letter, Southerners let loose with a howl of “fever and fury” and claimed that it proved he had never been one of them. Henry Clay released a similar statement at the same time, but aroused far less anger. Van Buren’s old friends in Virginia, where he had launched the great North-South alliance, rose up as one against him. James Buchanan, the boss of Pennsylvania, pronounced Van Buren “a dead cock in the pit.” In fact, he had done precisely what so many of his critics had said he was incapable of doing: he had taken a strong stand on principle, aware that it might cost him the presidency—as in fact it did. Even later that spring, when he might have recanted, he refused, saying he would not trim “his sails to catch the passing breeze.” This was Van Buren at his best.
Only a month after the Hammet letter was published, the Democracy met in Baltimore to anoint a candidate. Although they knew they were wounded, Van Buren’s supporters still expected to prevail over a field of weaker candidates. They were not prepared for one of the sleaziest conventions in political history. Over a succession of very hot days in late May, it became clear that Van Buren’s enemies had laid the groundwork for a palace revolt. While he commanded a majority of the delegates, he could not get to the necessary two-thirds, a rule that dated from the 1832 convention, infuriating the New Yorkers who saw the rule as anachronistic. Benjamin Butler became white with fury during a speech before the convention, stamping up and down to express his anger. But a large number of sordid promises had been made to neutral delegates, and Van Buren’s friends could not get to the necessary number.
Instead, the crowd settled into the sickening rhythms of a deadlocked convention, each vote pulling early supporters away from Van Buren and toward newcomers who were willing to compromise on Texas and slavery. Enraged, the New Yorkers narrowly avoided fistfights with Southerners, and a number of harsh speeches were given that exposed the frightening fault lines beneath the party. Finally, Tennessee’s James Polk, the former Speaker of the House and a friend of Jackson’s, emerged as the original “dark horse” candidate. The convention tried to throw a sop to New York by offering the second spot to Silas Wright, but Wright, responding through the new technology of the telegraph, refused on principle. As Henry Thoreau would write, simply because the South and the North could now speak more quickly to each other did not mean that they had anything to say.
It would take a long time before the wounds of the 1844 convention were healed. Thomas Hart Benton, Van Buren’s friend from Missouri, saw a dark design behind the scenes in Baltimore: “Disunion is at the bottom of this long-concealed Texas machination. Intrigue and speculation cooperate; but disunion is at the bottom; and I denounce it to the American people. Under the pretext of getting Texas into the Union, the scheme is to get the South out of it.” Sixteen years later, many would agree with Benton’s prescient analysis. The two-thirds rule would stay on the books until Franklin D. Roosevelt forcibly removed it in 1936, to the distress of Southern Democrats.
The Van Buren camp retired to lick its wounds. George Templeton Strong wrote that the ticket was “a severe dose for the Northern Democracy,” and added, “if Van Buren would consent to run, as he certainly won’t, I believe they’d be tempted to make a schism in the party.” That, too, was a prescient remark, but Van Buren was not yet ready to abandon his party, even though it had abandoned him. Instead he worked hard to swing New York for Polk, and in a very close campaign, he managed to do just that—a result that was crucial to Polk’s narrow victory. Expecting to be handsomely rewarded when it came time to select the new cabinet, Van Buren was devastated when Polk ignored all of his recommendations and instead favored a rival New York clique.
This was the last straw for many of Van Buren’s friends, and the New York Democracy began to unravel. Van Buren’s son John was especially angry and spoke loudly and frequently about settling scores. It was about politics—what wasn’t?—but it also touched, as everything now did, on the slavery divide. When Polk led the United States into war against Mexico, winning an enormous amount of new territory, the shadows only deepened. As the New York party split into pro- and anti-slavery camps (loosely nicknamed Hunkers and Barnburners), tensions rose to a boiling point. At the 1847 state convention, a witness reported, “never was there a fiercer, more bitter and relentless conflict between the Narragansetts and the Pequods than this memorable conflict between the Barnburners and the Hunkers.”
It must have been an agonizing time for Van Buren. He had devoted his entire life to building the Democracy, first at the state level and then across the nation. But now the world looked very different. The South had sabotaged him at Baltimore. Polk had personally humiliated him. Jackson had died in 1845. And all those closest to Van Buren were heading in a radical new direction. John Van Buren was becoming a formidable leader in his own right, and a gifted orator in a way that his father never was, “enthusiastic, frank, bold, and given to wit.” He began to call for mass meetings of the Barnburners, a first step to declaring war on the Hunkers. His father wrote a King Lear letter to a friend, trying to stop the dissolution of the party he had built. But the old warrior could not help answering the summons to battle.
At the beginning of 1848, Van Buren moved to a hotel in New York’s Washington Square and worked on a lengthy manuscript outlining his position. There, where so many literary manifestos would be issued in the twentieth century, he wrote out the “Barnburner Manifesto.” It demanded that the national party recognize the Barnburners as the legitimate representatives of New York Democracy, and supported a ban on slavery in the newly acquired territory from Mexico. Even more than that, it looked searchingly into early American history and found no evidence that the founders intended to expand slavery, or to protect it beyond where it existed. This was a powerful argument from a former president, and constituted a worthy, unjustly neglected precursor to Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address. The manifesto quickly created a sensation in New York, and John Van Buren wrote his father asking if he would consider running for president as the candidate of a new party. Van Buren’s response, on May 3, revealed all the currents and countercurrents flowing inside of him, calling for party loyalty, but proud that his son wanted him to bear the standard of the new organization he was building.
These cont
radictions were entirely in keeping with the moment; 1848 was an annus mirabilis, one of those rare years when the world turns upside down and anything under the sun feels possible. Across the Atlantic, a revolution in France was bringing the established order to its knees and hinted at even greater things to come—the spread of democracy across Europe, and the abolition of slavery around the world. But that was hardly the only event dazzling newspaper readers. In the United States, dramatic events were leading to the close of the Mexican War, and a roiling debate was forming over how to shape the peace. The discovery of gold in California, one of the newly acquired territories, only increased the din. Politicians from all backgrounds were acting very strangely. Abraham Lincoln, an obscure first-term congressman from Illinois, committed a form of hara-kiri by denouncing Polk for his aggression, and challenging him to show the precise spot where Mexicans had originally attacked Americans. For years afterward, Illinois voters would deride the man they called “Spotty” Lincoln.
In this disorienting context, the creation of a third party no longer seemed anathema. And so Van Buren moved inexorably toward a fateful decision, half pulled by his son, half pushed by his disgust with the way inferior politicians were ruining the great party that he had built. After the national Democratic convention accepted New York’s Hunker delegation in May, the Barnburners stormed out and John Van Buren called for a convention of their own in Utica. Inevitably, the question approached: would Martin Van Buren run one more time for the presidency? In response, he drafted a nineteen-page letter on June 20 answering no, but indicating by his detailed answer that he was interested. In stronger language than he had previously used, he outlined the long history of Congress’s efforts to constrain slavery, which was utterly at odds with “the principles of the Revolution.” He now went beyond his previous position by claiming that Congress had the power to limit its spread—a crucial point—and that having the power, it should use it. Thrilled by this bracing declaration of principles, the Utica convention nominated Van Buren and he was once again off to the races.
Official Washington was horrified at the news. Polk denounced the new party as “more threatening to the Union” than anything since the Hartford convention. Calhoun called Van Buren’s letter to Utica “the fierce war-cry of a new and formidable party,” and identified its author as “a bold, unscrupulous and vindictive demagogue.” Undeterred, the Barnburners held an even larger gathering in Buffalo on August 9, attracting twenty thousand people in a motley assemblage that combined former Whigs and Northern Democrats. The vice presidential nomination went to Charles Francis Adams, the son of Van Buren’s old rival John Quincy Adams, who had died on the floor of Congress in February. The resulting platform had a little bit for everyone—economic opportunity and cheap land for old Jacksonians, tariffs and improvements for old Whigs, and an exuberant celebration of “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men!” No longer would the Van Burenites have to apologize for gag rules, slave markets, and other insults to human liberty. Of course, no longer would they win elections, either.
The result was a foregone conclusion, but still it was interesting. It may be true, as William Allen Butler wrote, that “Van Buren’s name was in it, but not his head or his heart.” But once again he did his duty. Not only did he attack the new outrages of the Slave Power, but he argued movingly that “the wealth and power of a country consist in its labor.” With his strange new bedfellows, Van Buren threw himself into the Free Soil campaign, writing letters across the country from Kinderhook. He never quite solved the problem that he was too moderate for some and too radical for others, but the campaign spread and, in so doing, laid a foundation for the Republican Party.
Predictably, the people who had always hated him let fly with all the weapons in their arsenal. Polk called him “the most fallen man” he had ever known. Daniel Webster thought it hilarious that “the leader of the Free Spoil party should have so suddenly become the leader of the Free Soil party.” Newspapers denounced him as “the traitor and the hypocrite, the Judas Iscariot of the nineteenth century.” But others saw something noble in the spectacle. Charles Sumner, who hardly would have defended the old Van Buren, admired “the Van Buren of to-day,—the veteran statesman, sagacious, determined, experienced, who at an age when most men are rejoicing to put off their armor girds himself anew, and enters the lists as the champion of freedom.”
* * *
For a moment, a few exuberant supporters thought that it was possible the election would be thrown into the House and that Van Buren might prevail. But the actual numbers told otherwise. Van Buren received an impressive 291,804 votes—10 percent of the total—but he won no states outright. Gratifyingly, he tilted the election from the odious Lewis Cass, a conservative Michigan Democrat complicit in Van Buren’s defeat at Baltimore in 1844, to the Whig general Zachary Taylor. (Taylor won 163 electoral votes and 1.36 million popular votes to 127 and 1.22 million for Cass.) That was a more than respectable performance, especially given that the Free Soil party could not get on the ballot in the South, with the exception of Virginia, where Van Buren won a grand total of nine votes. When some of his supporters claimed fraud, a Virginian answered memorably: “Yes Fraud! And we’re still looking for the son-of-a-bitch who voted nine times.”
Still, he had made history one more time. The Free Soil campaign was America’s first great third-party effort. In one sense, it resembled a modern election—specifically the great Bull Moose campaign that a disgusted Theodore Roosevelt led in 1912, but also the single-issue grievances that have increasingly become a feature of modern presidential politics (Ross Perot, Ralph Nader). But it helps also to look retrospectively, and to see it as a final skirmish in the long fight that Van Buren had been waging for thirty years against Calhoun, since the day when Calhoun was the first official to pay him a visit in Washington. Certainly, there were more extreme Northerners and Southerners than Van Buren and Calhoun, but somehow the battle lines always seemed to be drawn around the personal rivalry between these two headstrong generals.
In the immediate aftermath of 1848, the young poet Walt Whitman, just finding his voice, wrote a poem entitled “Resurgemus” that gave vent to the extraordinary emotional energy he was feeling as one political world ended and a new one began to rise up around him. Whitman, a Van Buren supporter, was thrilled by the overthrow of kings across Europe during the revolutionary spring of 1848. But he also seethed with a barely containable rage at the insults to democracy that he saw all around him in the United States, beginning with the Slave Power and the politicians who would stop at nothing to advance human bondage. “Resurgemus”—Latin for “we will rise again”—expressed the frustrations of tens of thousands of Northern Democrats who sought an America consistent with the Declaration of Independence, and were no longer willing to accept meekly the verdicts of the Southern barons who controlled Congress. From Whitman: “O hope and faith! O aching close of exiled patriots’ lives! O many a sicken’d heart! Turn back unto this day, and make yourselves afresh. And you, paid to defile the People! you liars, mark!” Frighteningly, he foresaw the corpses of young men and gave the reader a premonition of the Civil War. But the poem ends with a sense of hope far more powerful than its despair:
Liberty! let others despair of you! I never despair of you.
Is the house shut? Is the master away?
Nevertheless, be ready—be not weary of watching;
He will soon return—his messengers come anon.
It took an extraordinary anger to pry Van Buren loose from his deep devotion to party loyalty, and he never won back some of his old supporters. But slavery was an extraordinary evil, spreading in 1848 as it never had done, in complete contradiction to what seemed like the rising tide of human liberty elsewhere. Was Van Buren right to break with the Democracy and wage a quixotic campaign that was doomed to failure? Certainly it compromised his legacy as the standard-bearer of party discipline. But what better answer to the charges that he was more concerned with his
advancement than with questions of principle? Van Buren’s determination to rise again against his tormentors served notice that the once-careful Dutchman and thousands with him would no longer brook interference with the right of Americans to self-determination. That righteous rage would express itself, soon enough, in the great military struggle to eliminate slavery forever on the North American continent. If “Resurgemus” contained the seeds of Leaves of Grass, the startling poem that would revolutionize poetry in 1855, then Van Buren’s last campaign contained the seeds of the epic war to determine America’s character once and for all along the lines promised by the founders.
9
Oblivion
Life continued after 1848, of course. But for the first time in his life, Van Buren had no political campaigns ahead of him. So he settled down to a long retirement—this time for real—enjoying friends, family, and the dwindling numbers of visitors who beat a path to Lindenwald. If the White House receded ever further from his grasp, there was some consolation in the fact that he did not have to preside over the steady disintegration of the United States in the 1850s. It must have depressed him to watch the fissures between North and South widen to the point where no up-and-coming Martin Van Buren could hope to repair the damage.
Van Buren could also take comfort in his remarkable longevity—although one wonders if he found it a blessing or a curse. He had enjoyed fine wine and food all his life, but now, improbably, he was outliving all of his peers, including his many tormentors and the parade of mediocrities who inherited the presidency from him. Harrison, of course, died almost as soon as the office hit him in 1841. A number of chief magistrates succumbed soon after: Jackson in 1845, Adams in 1848, Polk in 1849, and Taylor in 1850. Calhoun exited in 1850, Clay and Webster in 1852. Throughout the decade before the Civil War, Van Buren enjoyed seniority among the ex-presidents, ultimately resembling one of the elderly patriarchs invented by Faulkner, who outlives first his own cohort, then his children’s, until no one is quite sure who he was in the first place.
