The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  Regarding Calhoun, Van Buren took on the role of mediator with Jackson in their headlong clash over nullification, coaching the president on his famous dinner toast at the Jefferson birthday celebration, “The Union: It must be preserved,” and offering his own toast for “mutual forbearance and reciprocal concessions.”7

  That fall, with Van Buren as Jackson’s secretary of state, the president suddenly proposed a plan to him designed explicitly to make him his successor in the White House. Aging and tiring, Jackson had been saying he would serve only a single term. But now he informed Van Buren that he had decided to run again after all in 1832, with Van Buren as his running mate. Then, he told Van Buren privately, after their election and inauguration, he would resign the presidency, elevating his friend to the first office. Van Buren rejected the scheme,8 perhaps as too transparent and likely to undermine the credibility of such a presidency from the start.

  Rather, some months later during their morning ride on horseback along the Potomac, the Little Magician told Jackson in a scheme of his own that he wanted to resign from the cabinet. The president immediately replied that he could not afford to lose him but listened as Van Buren explained what he had in mind. Jackson, he said, could use Van Buren’s resignation as a rationale for breaking up the whole cabinet, which then included three troublesome Calhoun supporters. Van Buren proposed that the president then appoint him ambassador to London and appoint Secretary of War John Eaton to another overseas post, bringing all Van Buren men into the cabinet.9 Unspoken was the scheme of sending Van Buren to London, which would take him out of the line of political fire during a time of internal turmoil and dissention prior to the 1832 campaign, in which he would indeed be Jackson’s chosen running mate.

  Jackson followed through on the Van Buren strategy, breaking up his cabinet and sending the Little Magician to London, writing him that he hoped to retire from the presidency soon to “open the door” for a successor, adding knowingly that Van Buren would “understand” him. Shortly afterward came another letter in the same vein, saying Jackson wanted to arrange “the selection of a vice president” to his satisfaction, enabling him to retire “to the peaceful shades of the Hermitage,” his mansion in Tennessee.10

  In the meantime, however, Van Buren was basking in the luxury of being an ambassador, writing so glowingly to Jackson about his new circumstance that the president began to wonder whether his preferred successor had changed his mind. But when Louis McLane, who had become Jackson’s treasury secretary in the cabinet shake-up, began to indicate vice presidential ambitions of his own, Van Buren dropped the coyness. In response to a suggestion that he return to the Senate rather than seek the second office, he wrote Jackson that he had a “strong repugnance” to the idea and was ready to be his vice presidential running mate. He would remain abroad to avoid the approaching Democratic convention, leaving his “friends” to decide his future.11

  Reports of other Jackson supporters considering a challenge to Van Buren soon faded. At the convention in Baltimore in May, Jackson was renominated by acclamation, and the only real business was endorsing his choice of running mate. To assure a unified party, the convention adopted a rule requiring a two-thirds vote for nomination of both president and vice president, and Van Buren cleared the hurdle with 260 of the 326 votes cast.12

  On Van Buren’s return in early July, he went to the White House and was shocked by Jackson’s emaciated appearance and concerned by his distress. Congress had just passed a bill pushed by Clay to recharter the Bank of the United States. The president greeted him with “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me, but I will kill it!”13 Whereupon Jackson vetoed the bill, only to be confronted a few days later with passage of a new tariff bill, both issues on which Van Buren would have to take positions as the campaign unfolded.

  The opposition to the Democrats in the 1832 election was split between the National Republican ticket headed by Henry Clay and the new Anti-Mason third party, which chose as its presidential nominee the former attorney general William Wirt of Maryland, himself a former Mason. Together they railed against “King Andrew I” for his use of the veto against the bank, and they began to call themselves “Whigs,” after the British who opposed their monarch in the eighteenth century.

  The Democrats happily focused not on Clay but on the return of the national bank and particularly its banker champion, Nicholas Biddle, who played into Jackson’s hands by saying, “This worthy President thinks that because he has scalped Indians and imprisoned judges he is to have his way with the Bank. He is mistaken.”14 But it was Biddle who was wrong, because the Democratic strategy trumpeted the election as a battle of the “real people” against the huge moneyed interests in an early version of American class warfare.

  Jackson assured Van Buren that his veto of the bank bill would turn out to be a political masterstroke. “The veto works well,” he enthused. “Instead of crushing me as was expected and intended, it will crush the Bank.” Van Buren agreed: “The veto is popular beyond my most sanguine expectations.”15

  On this and other issues, he sought not so much to drive Jackson’s decision making as to be a cautionary voice of moderation, as he continued to maintain his goal of cementing the North-South alliance as the bedrock of the Jacksonian Democratic Party. On the whole nullification matter, Van Buren preached understanding of the South’s position on states’ rights and slavery without succumbing to or apologizing for it. When Jackson issued a proclamation condemning nullification as “incompatible with the existence of the Union,” he subsequently wrote Van Buren that he intended to charge nullifiers with “acts of treason,” calling on Congress for “the power to call upon volunteers” to quash “this wicked faction in its bud.”16 Van Buren counseled Jackson to cool off and, in dealing with Virginia, to allow for “honest differences of opinion.” Typically, he wrote, “You will say, I am on my old track—caution—caution.” Jackson continued to talk tough, while promising Van Buren that he would act with “forbearance.”17

  The Democratic ticket of Jackson and Van Buren—wedding the old Jeffersonian planters of the South and “the plain Republicans” of the North—was easily elected. Once sworn in as vice president, Van Buren as presiding officer of the Senate had to contend with a torrent of abuse against Jackson, particularly from the old foe Clay, over killing the second national bank and the rate of transferred deposits to state banks. In one such tirade, Clay compared Jackson to the “the worst of the Roman emperors” and demanded that Van Buren tell the president of the “tears of helpless widows … and of unclad and unfed orphans” who had suffered at Jackson’s hands.

  Van Buren sat calmly through the abuse, but when it was over he rose from his chair and walked threateningly over to Clay on the Senate floor. As other senators stared in anticipation of a brawl, Van Buren politely asked of Clay, “Mr. Senator, allow me to be indebted to you for another pinch of your aromatic Maccoboy.” He then took the snuff, inhaled it, and returned to his chair, deflating Clay.18

  As president of the Senate, Van Buren also had to find accommodating ground on the slavery issue. As a northerner who favored emancipation but was cool to abolitionists, he believed questions related to the issue should be left to the states. Required to break a tie vote on a Calhoun resolution authorizing local postal officials to confiscate abolitionist mailings barred by state law, he cast his ballot with the South—apparently a nod to the preservation of his cherished North-South party alliance.19

  As the congressional argument over the bank dragged on, including a Senate resolution to censure Jackson, Van Buren continued to counsel the president to soften his responses, and the legislative session ended with the Second Bank of the United States still interred and the fight over. Jacksonian Democracy was firmly established, but the strong sentiment against Jackson himself among the splintered opposition led to the coalescence of what came to be called the Whig Party. As Jackson had fully intended, Van Buren would use the vice presidency as a stepping-stone to the Democra
tic presidential nomination in 1836 and then election.

  But for all the knowledge and experience he gained from being at Jackson’s elbow as his lieutenant as well as his standby, Van Buren as president was soon the victim of an economic depression and what came to be called the panic of 1837. In the process, he acquired a new nickname: “Martin Van Ruin.” In The National Experience: A History of the United States, it is said of him that he “was a pale copy of his chief” and had none of Jackson’s talents to deal with the collapse of the economy.20 In 1840, he lost his bid for reelection to the Whig nominee, General William Henry Harrison, another War of 1812 hero, as the Whigs chanted, “Van, Van, he’s a used-up man.”

  Van Buren retired to his Kinderhook estate to contemplate a possible comeback and, in the spring of 1842, made an extensive southern and western swing to assess his prospects. But he lost the party nomination in 1844 to the dark horse governor James K. Polk of Tennessee at a wild convention at which Polk first sought only the vice presidential nomination. Van Buren tried again as the nominee of the new Free Soil Party but lost to still another military hero, General Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate, and lived long enough to witness the secession of the southern states and the start of the Civil War. He died at his home in New York’s Hudson Valley on July 24, 1862, at age seventy-nine.

  Van Buren probably came closer than any previous vice president in playing key administrative roles in both domestic and foreign affairs. Upon assuming the presidency, however, the earlier access to and close association with his predecessor were not enough to make his single term a success. Rather, his greatest political contribution was his prime role in building Jacksonian Democracy and the Democratic Party itself.

  RICHARD MENTOR JOHNSON

  OF KENTUCKY

  As the presidential election year of 1836 approached, the lame-duck president Jackson had already resolved that his handpicked vice president, Martin Van Buren, would be the presidential nominee of the Jacksonian Democratic Party, of which he had been the principal architect. As for a running mate, Jackson and others concluded that it would be best to nominate a westerner to balance the New Yorker, who, while highly regarded for his political acumen, aroused reservations elsewhere in the country. For the first time under the Twelfth Amendment, however, the choice would fall to the United States Senate.

  In Tennessee, some original Jackson men who were cool to Van Buren pushed the rival presidential candidacy of Senator Hugh Lawson White of their state, and Jackson felt White’s strength also signaled the need for a Van Buren running mate from the West, particularly someone who had been loyal to Jackson. With Jackson’s own pending retirement, another hero of the War of 1812, but of considerably less luster, emerged in Congressman Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky. As an army colonel in 1813, he claimed to have killed the feared Shawnee Indian chief Tecumseh, allied with the British, in the Battle of the Thames, in Ontario, Canada, northeast of Detroit.1

  The claim was never verified beyond a report that Tecumseh, in the course of a tomahawk charge, had fallen from a bullet fired by an American officer on horseback, Johnson having been mounted at the time. When the war broke out, Johnson had formed two mounted regiments under the governor of the Indiana Territory, General William Henry Harrison. Under Harrison’s command, Johnson and his troops had crossed into Canada in pursuit of the British general Henry Proctor and the Shawnee Indians accompanying him, who had been attacking American settlements. Johnson’s reported encounter with Tecumseh, given the fame it brought him, proved to be the pivotal event of his life.2

  But aside from that, Johnson had compiled an impressive record in the Kentucky legislature before the war and also did so as a thirty-year member of the U.S. Congress, serving at different times in the House and Senate between 1807 and 1837. He was one of the “War Hawks” led by House Speaker Henry Clay, who pushed President Madison to take up arms against the British for attacks on American shipping and frontier settlements and who voted to declare war in 1812. Much wounded in the frontier warfare, Johnson returned to Congress in 1814 and as a senator became an ardent Jackson supporter. As a frontiersman, he was a defender of the farmer and distrustful of bankers and speculators and, as a military man, a champion of veterans, their wives or widows, and their children.

  In 1819, when Jackson faced the censure sought by Clay for the execution of two British citizens as spies during the Seminole Indian war, Johnson was among the general’s defenders in Congress. He voted for Jackson in 1824, when the presidential election against John Quincy Adams was thrown into the House. He was also said to have been the one to inform Jackson of Adams’s appointment of Clay as secretary of state in the “corrupt bargain,” which sealed Jackson’s commitment to Johnson thereafter.

  Johnson at first was touted among western supporters as a presidential candidate, a natural successor to Jackson, a fellow frontiersman and warrior against the Indians. Circulation of pamphlets casting him as the next Jackson spread through the West along with a biography and even a play, Tecumseh, or the Battle of the Thames, featuring the Johnson character as hero.3

  Van Buren himself was not thrilled over the prospects of Johnson as his running mate. He would have preferred the former senator William C. Rives of Virginia, Jackson’s minister to Paris in his first term, in furthering restoration of the alliance between the two bedrock states of the Jeffersonian era. At the same time Van Buren was peeved over the constant southern complaints about him, accusing him of abolitionist sentiments, despite all his efforts to accommodate the South. “God knows I have suffered enough for my Southern partialities,” he wrote to Rives’s wife. “Since I was a boy I have been stigmatized as the apologist of Southern institutions, & now forsooth you good people will have it … that I am an abolitionist.”4 Rives felt his service to Jackson had been brushed aside and with it the special tie between New York and Virginia, but Jackson felt strongly about having a westerner on the ticket and could not be ignored.

  Van Buren also was concerned about Johnson’s reputation for some shady deals involving his kin and even more so about his more immediate family life. Despite later accounts that he had had a log-cabin boyhood, his father became one of Kentucky’s largest landowners, and his mother was said to have broken off his early engagement with a young woman because she felt the bride-to-be was unworthy. Supposedly out of revenge after his father’s death, young Johnson took a mulatto slave girl named Julia Chinn, left to him by his father, and treated her as his common-law wife.5 He gave her control over his business affairs and educated their two children. When she died, the story went, he took up with another slave girl, and when she left him for another man, Johnson had her sold at auction and began a relationship with her sister.

  Somehow all this did not derail his rise in Kentucky politics, although it drew wide condemnation of him later as a prospective vice president. Chief Justice John Catron of the Tennessee Supreme Court complained that Johnson was “not only positively unpopular with that class who give tone to a public man, but affirmatively odious” in Tennessee.6 He warned Jackson, “The very moment Col. J. is announced [as Van Buren’s running mate], the newspapers will open upon him with facts, that he had endeavored often to force his daughters into society, that the mother in her life time, and they now, rode in carriages, and claimed equality.”7 The judge also observed of Johnson’s abilities that he wanted “capacity, a fact generally known and universally admitted.” He urged Jackson, “Assure our friends that the humblest of us do not believe that a lucky random shot, even if it did kill Tecumseh, qualifies a man for the Vice Presidency.”8

  But with Jackson headed for retirement after his two terms, the Democratic ticket lacked the glamour of the Hero of New Orleans. So perhaps giving Van Buren, who had never served in the military and lacked Jackson’s personal popularity, another old war hero as his running mate would add luster. Playing on Johnson’s image as a frontiersman rather than on his long service in Congress, the Democratic operatives unabashedly started peddling hi
m with the ludicrous campaign rhyme: “Rumpsey, Dumpsey; Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh!”9

  When the Democrats held a national convention in Baltimore on May 20, 1835, it was done so merely to ratify Jackson’s choice of Van Buren to run for president. Van Buren was unopposed, but the Virginians insisted on Rives as his running mate instead of the Jackson-anointed Johnson, splitting the convention. Tennessee had no delegates present, whereupon the Jackson–Van Buren forces drafted an unknown Tennessean named Edmund Rucker, who was visiting the convention, to cast the state’s fifteen votes needed to give Johnson the vice presidential nomination. Johnson was chosen on the first ballot.10

  The rival Whigs held no national convention in 1836, instead using a combination of state legislative caucuses, conventions, and local meetings that resulted in multiple nominations by this yet-to-be-consolidated party. A Whig convention in Pennsylvania successfully put forward Johnson’s superior officer in the War of 1812, General William Henry Harrison, the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe. For vice president, the anti–Van Buren forces were offered a choice between to a former Democrat from Virginia, John Tyler, and an Anti-Mason from New York, Francis Granger. The multiplicity of candidates doomed the Whigs’ chances, who sought to win support on the basis of opposition to King Andrew’s handpicking of his heir.

  In a way, Johnson’s political ambitions were a factor in Harrison’s decision to seek the presidency himself. The attention coming Johnson’s way in the political exploitation of Tecumseh’s death inspired western followers of Harrison to advertise his own military record as more deserving of the Jackson mantle than that of the man who had served under Harrison. Johnson’s boosters had been glorifying him at commemorative celebrations at the site of the battle, apparently to Harrison’s irritation. When the general was invited to attend one of the commemorations, he publicly chastised Johnson for posing as the hero of the battle in which Harrison was the American commander. Harrison enthusiasts then began to generate a groundswell for a candidacy of his own.