Chapter XII · VAN BUREN'S CHARACTER AND PLACE IN HISTORY

In the engraved portrait of Van Buren in old age, prefixed to his "History of Parties," are plainly to be seen some of his traits,—the alert outlooking upon men, the bright, easy good-humor, the firm, self-reliant judgment. Inman's painting, now in the City Hall of New York,[20] gives the face in the prime of life,—the same shrewd, kindly expression, but more positively touched with that half cynical doubt of men which almost inevitably belongs to those in great places. The deep wrinkles of the old and retired ex-president were hardly yet incipient in the smooth, prosperous, almost complacent countenance of the governor. In the earlier picture the locks flared outwards from the face, as they did later; as yet, however, they were dark and a bit curling. His form was always slender and erect, but hardly reached the middle height, so that to his political enemies it was endless delight to call him "Little Van."

In the older picture one sees a scrupulous daintiness about the ruffled shirt and immaculate neckerchief; for Van Buren was fond of the elegance of life. The Whigs used to declare him an aristocrat, given to un-American, to positively British splendor. Very certainly he never affected contempt for the gracious and stately refinement suited to his long held place of public honor, that contempt which a silly underrating of American good sense has occasionally commended to our statesmen. At Lindenwald, among books and guests and rural cares, he led what in the best and truest sense was the life of a country gentleman, not set like an urban exotic among the farmers, but fond of his neighbors as they were fond of him, and unaffectedly sharing without loss of distinction or elegance their thrifty and homely cares. When he retired to this home he was able, without undignified or humiliating shifts, to live in ease and even affluence. For in 1841 his fortune of perhaps $200,000 was a generous one. His last days were not, like those of Jefferson and Monroe and Jackson, embittered by money anxieties, the penalty of the careless profusion the temptation to which, felt even by men wise in the affairs of others, is often greater than the certain danger and unwisdom of its indulgence. But no suggestion was breathed against his pecuniary integrity, public or private. Nor was there heard of him any story of wrong or oppression or ungenerous dealing.

Van Buren's extraordinary command of himself was apparent in his manners. They are finely described from intimate acquaintance by William Allen Butler, the son of Van Buren's long-time friend, in his charming and appreciative sketch printed just after Van Buren's death. They had, Mr. Butler said, a neatness and polish which served every turn of domestic, social, and public intercourse. "As you saw him once, you saw him always—always punctilious, always polite, always cheerful, always self-possessed. It seemed to anyone who studied this phase of his character as if, in some early moment of destiny, his whole nature had been bathed in a cool, clear, and unruffled depth, from which it drew this life-long serenity and self-control." An accomplished English traveler, "the author of 'Cyril Thornton,'" who saw him while secretary of state, and before he had been abroad, said that he had more of "the manner of the world" than any other of the distinguished men at Washington; that in conversation he was "full of anecdote and vivacity." Chevalier, one of our French critics, in his letters from America described him as setting up "for the American Talleyrand." John Quincy Adams, as has been said, sourly mistook all this, and even the especial courtesy Van Buren paid him after his political downfall, as mere proof of insincerity; and he more than once compared Van Buren to Aaron Burr, a comparison of which many Democrats were fond after 1848. In his better-natured moments, however, Adams saw in his adversary a resemblance to the conciliatory and philosophic Madison. For his "extreme caution in avoiding and averting personal collisions," he called him another Sosie of Molière's "Amphitryon," "ami de tout le monde."

Van Buren's skill in dealing with men was indeed extraordinary. It doubtless came from this temper of amity, and from an inborn genius for society; but it had been wonderfully sharpened in the unrivaled school of New York's early politics. When he was minister at London, he wrote that he was making it his business to be cordial with prominent men on both sides; a branch of duty, he said, in which he was not at home, because he had all his life been "wholly on one side." But he was jocosely unjust to himself. He was, for the politics of his day, abundantly fair to his adversaries. Sometimes indeed he saw too much of what might be said on the other side. Had he seen less, he would sometimes have been briefer, less indulgent in formal caution. Nor did he fail to avoid the unnecessary misery caused to many public men, the obstacles needlessly raised in their way, by personal disputes, or by letting into negotiations matters of controversy irrelevant to the thing to be done. Patience in listening, a steady and singularly acute observance of the real end he sought, and a quick, keen reading of men, saved him this wearing unhappiness so widespread in public life. Once he thus criticised his friend Cambreleng: "There is more in small matters than he is always aware of, although he is a really sensible and useful man." In this maxim of lesser things Van Buren was carefully practiced. During the Jackson-Adams campaign, the younger Hamilton was about sending to some important person an account of the general. Van Buren, knowing of this, wrote to Hamilton, and, after signing his letter, added: "P. S.—Does the old gentleman have prayers in his own house? If so, mention it modestly."

His self-command was not stilted or unduly precise or correct. He was very human. A candidate for governor of New York would to-day hardly write to another public man, however friendly to him, as Van Buren in August and September, 1828, wrote to Hamilton. "Bet on Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois," he said, "jointly if you can, or any two of them; don't forget to bet all you can." But this was the fashion of the day.[21] His life was entirely free from the charges of dissipation or of irregular habits, then so commonly, and often truly, made against great men. This very correctness was part of the offense he gave his rivals and their followers. It would hardly be accurate to describe him, even in younger years, as jovial with his friends; but he was perfectly companionable. Of a social and cheerful temper, he not only liked the decorous gaiety of receptions and public entertainment, but was delighted and delightful in closer and easier conversation and in the chat of familiar friends. His reminiscences of men are said to have been full of the charm which flows from a strong natural sense of humor, and a correct and vivid memory of human action and character.

There are many apocryphal stories of Van Buren's craft or cunning or selfishness in politics. It is a curious appreciation with which reputable historians have received such stories from irresponsible or anonymous sources; for they deserve as little credence as those told of Lincoln's frivolity or indecency. To them all may not only be pleaded the absence of any proof deserving respect, but they are refuted by positive proof, such as from earliest times has been deemed the best which private character can in its own behalf offer to history. In politics Van Buren enjoyed as much strong and constant friendship as he encountered strong and constant hatred. Nothing points more surely to the essential soundness of life and the generosity of a public man than the near and long-continued friendship of other able, upright, and honorably ambitious men. It was an extraordinary measure in which Van Buren enjoyed friendship of this quality. With all the light upon his character, Jackson was too shrewd to suffer long from imposition. His intimacy with Van Buren for twenty years and more was really affectionate; his admiration for the younger statesman was profound. The explanation is both unnecessary and unworthy, which ascribes to hatred of Clay all Jackson's ardor in the canvass of 1840 or his almost pathetic anxiety for Van Buren's nomination in 1844. Their peculiar and continuous association for six years at Washington had so powerfully established Van Buren in his love and respect, that neither distant separation nor disease nor the nearer intrigues and devices of rivals could abate them. Those who were especially known as Van Buren men, those who not only stood with him in the party but who went with him out of it, were men of great talents and of the highest character. Butler's career closely accompanied Van Buren's. Both were born at Kinderhook; they were together in Hudson, in Albany, in Washington; they were together as Bucktails, as Jacksonian Democrats, as Free-soil men; they were close to one another from Butler's boyhood until, more than a half-century later, they were parted by death. To this strong-headed and sound-hearted statesman, we are told by William Allen Butler, in a fine and wellnigh sufficient eulogy, that Van Buren was the object of an affection true and steadfast, faithful through good report and evil report, loyal to its own high sense of duty and affection, tender and generous. Benton, liberal and sane a slaveholder though he was, did not approve the Wilmot Proviso, or join the Free-soil revolt. But in retirement and old age, reviewing his "Thirty Years," during twenty of which he and Van Buren had, spite of many differences, remained on closely intimate terms, he showed a deep liking for the man. Silas Wright, Azariah C. Flagg, and John A. Dix, all strong and famous characters in the public life of New York, were among the others of those steadily faithful in loyal and unwavering regard for this political and personal chief. Nor were they deceived. Jackson and Butler, Wright and Flagg and Dix, sturdy, upright, skillful, experienced men of affairs, were not held in true and lifelong friendship and admiration by the insinuating manners, the clever management, the selfish and timid aims, which make the Machiavellian caricature of Van Buren so often drawn. No American in public life has shown firmer and longer devotion to his friends. His reputation for statesmanship must doubtless rest upon the indisputable facts of his career. But for his integrity of life, for his sincerity, for his fidelity to those obligations of political, party, and personal friendship, within which lies so much of the usefulness as well as of the singular charm of public life, his relations with these men make a proof not to be questioned, and surely not to be weakened by the malicious or anonymous stories of political warfare.

For the absurdly sinister touch which his political enemies gave to his character, it is difficult now to find any just reason. It may be that the cool and imperturbable appearance of good-nature, with which he received the savage and malevolent attacks so continually made upon him, to many seemed so impossible to be real as to be sheer hypocrisy;[22] and from the fancy of such hypocrisy it was easy for the imagination to infer all the arts and characteristics of deceit. Doubtless the caution of Van Buren's political papers irritated impatient and angry opponents. They found them full of elaborate and subtle reservations, as they fancied, against future political contingencies; a charge, it ought to be remembered, which is continually made against the ripest, bravest, and greatest character in English politics of to-day or of the century.[23] Van Buren's reasoning was perfectly clear, and his style highly finished. But he had not the sort of genius which in a few phrases states and lights up a political problem. The complexity of human affairs, the danger of short and sweeping assertions, pressed upon him as he wrote; and the amplitude of his arguments, sometimes tending to prolixity, seemed timid and lawyer-like to those who disliked his conclusions.

Van Buren was not, however, an unpopular man, except as toward the last his politics were unpopular as politics out of sympathy with those of either of the great parties, and except also at the South, where he was soon suspected and afterwards hated as an anti-slavery man. He was on the whole a strong candidate at the polls. In his own State and at the Northeast his strength with the people grew more and more until his defeat by the slaveholders in 1844. Perhaps the most striking proof of this strength was the canvass of 1848, when in New York he was able to take fully half of his party with him into irregular opposition, a feat with hardly a precedent in our political history. And there was complete reciprocity. Van Buren was profoundly democratic in his convictions. He thoroughly, honestly, and without demagogy believed in the common people and in their competence to deal wisely with political difficulties. Even when his faith was tried by what he deemed the mistakes of popular elections, he still trusted to what in a famous phrase of his he called "the sober second thought of the people."[24]

However widely the student of history may differ from the politics of Van Buren's associates, the politics of Benton, Wright, Butler, and Dix, and in a later rank of his New York disciples, of Samuel J. Tilden and Sanford E. Church, it is impossible not to see that their political purpose was at the least as long and steady as their friendship for Van Buren. Love for the Union, a belief in a simple, economical, and even unheroic government, a jealousy of taking money from the people, and a scrupulous restriction upon the use of public moneys for any but public purposes, a strict limitation of federal powers, a dislike of slavery and an opposition to its extension,—these made up one of the great and fruitful political creeds of America, a creed which had ardent and hopeful apostles a half century ago, and which, save in the articles which touched slavery and are now happily obsolete, will doubtless find apostles no less ardent and hopeful a half century hence. Each of its assertions has been found in other creeds; but the entire creed with all its articles made the peculiar and powerful faith only of the Van Buren men. As history gradually sets reputations aright, the leader of these men must justly wear the laurel of a statesman who, apart from his personal and party relations and ambitions, has stood clearly for a powerful and largely triumphant cause.

No vague, no thoughtless rush of popular sentiment touched or shook this faith of Van Buren. Had there been indeed a readier emphasis about him, a heartier and quicker sympathy with the temper of the day, he would perhaps have aroused a popular enthusiasm, he might perhaps have been the hero which in fact he never was. But his intellectual perceptions did not permit the subtle self-deceit, the enthusiastic surrender to current sentiment, to which the striking figures that delight the masses of men are so apt to yield. Van Buren was steadfast from the beginning to the end, save when the war threats of slavery alarmed his old age and the sober second thought of a really patient and resolute people seemed a long time coming. Two years before his death Jefferson wrote to Van Buren an elaborate sketch of his relations with Hamilton and of our first party division. Two years before his own death Van Buren was finishing a history of the same political division written upon the theory and in the tone running through Jefferson's writings. It was composed by Van Buren in the very same temper in which he had respectfully read the weighty epistle from the great apostle of Democracy. Between the ending life at Monticello and that at Lindenwald, the political faith of the older man had been steadily followed by the younger.

The rise of the "spoils" system, and the late coming, but steadily increasing perception of its corruptions and dangers, have seriously and justly dimmed Van Buren's fame. But history should be not less indulgent to him than to other great Americans. The practical politics which he first knew had been saturated with the abuse. He did no more than adopt accustomed means of political warfare. Neither he nor other men of his time perceived the kind of evil which political proscription of men in unpolitical places must yield. They saw the undoubted rightfulness of shattering the ancient idea that in offices there was a property right. They saw but too clearly the apparent help which the powerful love of holding office brings to any political cause, and which has been used by every great minister of state the world over. Van Buren had, however, no love of patronage in itself. The use of a party as a mere agency to distribute offices would have seemed to him contemptible. In neither of the great executive places which he held, as governor, secretary of state, or president, did he put into an extreme practice the proscriptive rules which were far more rigorously adopted about him. To his personal temper not less than to his conceptions of public duty the inevitable meanness and wrong of the system were distasteful.

Chief among the elements of Van Buren's public character ought to be ranked his moral courage and the explicitness of his political utterances,—the two qualities which, curiously enough, were most angrily denied him by his enemies. His well-known Shocco Springs letter of 1832 on the tariff was indeed lacking in these qualities; but he was then not chiefly interested. There was only a secondary responsibility upon him. But it is not too much to say that no American in responsible and public station, since the days when Washington returned from his walk among the miserable huts at Valley Forge to write to the Continental Congress, or to face the petty imbecilities of the jealous colonists, has shown so complete a political courage as that with which Van Buren faced the crisis of 1837, or in which he wrote his famous Texas letter. Nor did any American, stirred with ambition, conscious of great powers, as was this captain of politicians, and bringing all his political fortunes, as he must do, to the risks of universal suffrage, ever meet living issues dangerously dividing men ready to vote for him if he would but remain quiet, with clearer or more decided answers than did Van Buren in his Sherrod Williams letter of 1836 and in most of his chief public utterances from that year until 1844. The courtesies of his manner, his failure in trenchant brevity, and even the almost complete absence of invective or extravagance from his papers or speeches, have obscured these capital virtues of his character. He saw too many dangers; and he sometimes made it too clear that he saw them. But upon legitimate issues he was among the least timid and the most explicit of great Americans. No president of ours has in office been more courageous or more direct.

It is perhaps an interesting, it is at least a harmless speculation, to look for Van Buren's place of honor in the varied succession of men who have reached the first office, though not always the first place, in American public life. Every student will be powerfully, even when unconsciously, influenced in this judgment by the measure of strength or beneficence he accords to different political tendencies. With this warning the present writer will, however, venture upon an opinion.

Van Buren very clearly does not belong among the mediocrities or accidents of the White House,—among Monroe, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, and Pierce, not to meddle with the years since the civil war whose party disputes are still part of contemporary politics. Van Buren reached the presidency by political abilities and public services of the first order, as the most distinguished active member of his party, and with a universal popular recognition for years before his promotion that he was among the three or four Americans from whom a president would be naturally chosen. Buchanan's experience in public life was perhaps as great as Van Buren's, and his political skill and distinction made his accession to the presidency by no means unworthy. But he never led, he never stood for a cause; he never led men; he was never chief in his party; and in his great office he sank with timidity before the slaveholding aggressors, as they strove with vengeance to suppress freedom in Kansas, and before the menaces and open plunderings of disunion. Van Buren showed no such timidity in a place of equal difficulty.

Jackson stands in a rank by himself. He had a stronger and more vivid personality than Van Buren. But useful as he was to the creation of a powerful sentiment for union and of a hostility to the schemes of a paternal government, it is clear that in those qualities of steady wisdom, foresight, patience, which of right belong to the chief magistracy of a republic, he was far inferior to his less picturesque and less forceful successor. The first Adams, a man of very superior parts, competent and singularly patriotic, was deep in too many personal collisions within and without his party, and his presidency incurred too complete and lasting, and it must be added, too just a popular condemnation, to permit it high rank, though very certainly he belonged among neither the mediocrities nor the accidents of the White House.

If to the highest rank of American presidents be assigned Washington, and if after him in it come Jefferson and perhaps Lincoln (though more than a quarter of a century must go to make the enduring measure of his fame), the second rank would seem to include Madison, the younger Adams, and Van Buren. Between the first and the last of these, the second of them, as has been said, saw much resemblance. But if Madison had a mellower mind, more obedient to the exigencies of the time and of a wider scholarship, Van Buren had a firmer and more direct courage, a steadier loyalty to his political creed, and far greater resolution and efficiency in the performance of executive duties. If one were to imitate Plutarch in behalf of John Quincy Adams and Van Buren, he would need largely to compare their rival political creeds. But leaving these, it will not be unjust to say that in virile and indomitable continuance of moral purpose after official power had let go its trammels, and when the harassments and feebleness of age were inexorable, and though the heavens were to fall, the younger Adams was the greater; that in executive success they were closely together in a high rank; but that in skill and power of political leadership, in breadth of political purpose, in freedom from political vagaries, in personal generosity and political loyalty, Van Buren was easily the greater man.

Van Buren did not have the massive and forcible eloquence of Webster, or the more captivating though fleeting speech of Clay, or the delightful warmth of the latter's leadership, or the strength and glory which their very persons and careers gave to American nationality. But in the persistent and fruitful adherence to a political creed fitted to the time and to the genius of the American people, in that noble art which gathers and binds to one another and to a creed the elements of a political party, the art which disciplines and guides the party, when formed, to clear and definite purposes, without wavering and without weakness or demagogy, Van Buren was a greater master than either of those men, in many things more interesting as they were. In this exalted art of the politician, this consummate art of the statesman, Van Buren was close to the greatest of American party leaders, close to Jefferson and to Hamilton.

In his very last years the stir and rumbling of war left Van Buren in quiet recollection and anxious loyalty at Lindenwald. As his growing illness now and then spared him moments of ease, his mind must sometimes have turned back to the steps of his career, senator of his State, senator of the United States, governor, first cabinet minister, foreign envoy, vice-president, and president. There must again have sounded in his ears the hardly remembered jargon of Lewisites and Burrites, Clintonians and Livingstonians, Republicans and Federalists, Bucktails and Jacksonians and National Republicans, Democrats and Whigs, Loco-focos and Conservatives, Barnburners and Hunkers. There must rapidly though dimly have shifted before him the long series of his struggles,—struggles over the second war with England, over internal improvements, the Bank, nullification, the divorce of bank and state, the resistance to slavery extension. Through them all there had run, and this at least his memory clearly recalled, the one strong faith of his politics and statesmanship. In all his labors of office, in all his multifarious strifes, he never faltered in upholding the Union. But not less firmly would this true disciple of Jefferson restrain the activities of the federal government. Whatever wisdom, whatever integrity of purpose might belong to ministers and legislators at Washington,—though the strength of the United States might be theirs, and though they were panoplied in the august prestige rightly ascribed by American patriotism to that sovereign title of our nation,—still Van Buren was resolute that they should not do for the people what the States or the people themselves could do as well. To his eyes there was clear and undimmed from the beginning to the close of his career, the idea of government as an instrument of useful public service, rather than an object of superstitious veneration, the idea but two years after his death clothed with memorable words by a master in brief speech, the democratic idea of a "government of the people, by the people, for the people."

FOOTNOTES