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CHAPTER III.

VAN BUREN'S ADMINISTRATION.

1. HIS POLITICAL CAREER-THE CRISIS OF 1837 AND THE INDEPENDENT TREASURY.

The proclamation of the treaty with the Sacs and Foxes, which perfected the breaking through of the Missouri line, was one of Jackson's last governmental acts. Le roi est mort; vive le roi! So they cry in the United States, as well as in the monarchies of the old world. The first officer of the republic is wont to become a victim, to a greater or lesser extent, of political paralysis, for some time previous to his official death. The months intervening between the election of a new president and his inauguration to office, constitute, as a rule, a species of interregnum. All eyes are turned from the setting to the rising constellation. The constitution has so amalgamated the executive and the legislative branches of the government, in their functions, that it would be generally considered repugnant, both to sound policy and decorum, for either to go beyond the limits of mere routine business, without very cogent reason, during this time of transition. If a party of opposition has come forth from the battle victorious, any important political action taken by the party still in power is denounced as a violation of the principle of democracy. Positive law, and the real or assumed genius of the institutions of the country, come in conflict with each other. As the victors look upon it, the defeated endeavor to regain a part of the prize lost in the open campaign by dishonorable coups de main. Parties learn to look upon one another, not as opponents, but as

enemies, who owe one another no regard. If there has been only a change of persons, the interest of the party has usually nothing to apprehend from the short delay. It is considered a reasonable wish of the president-elect to enter on the office not less free-within the limits of the constitution and of the party's programme-in what relates to the warp and woof of his policy, than was his predecessor.

If we can attach absolute faith to the assurances of Jackson's successor, he had never been guilty of entertaining this wish, which, in his particular case, would have been an unwarranted assumption. In his inaugural address, Van Buren referred to the fact that he was the first president who had had no part in the transfiguration-splendor of the revolutionary period. But if, indeed, criticism approached him from the first with a different disposition, the fact was to be ascribed to this purely external cause, only to a very small extent. Not only as to time did he stand the representative of a new generation. The era of statesmen had come to a close with John Quincy Adams. The politicians, who, in Jackson's election, had won their first victory, were able, only eight years later, to raise a man from their own ranks to the presidential chair Van Buren, the first politician-president. Jackson was no statesman, but he was a character. If the era of the politicians dates from his administration, it is not due to the fact that he was a politician himself, but to the fact that his character made him as pliable as wax in the hands of the politicians. His "reign" receives the stamp which characterizes it, precisely from the fact that the poli

"Unlike all who have preceded me, the revolution that gave us existence as one people was achieved at the period of my birth; and while I contemplate with grateful reverence that memorable event, I feel that I belong to a later age, and that I may not expect my countrymen to weigh my actions with the same kind and partial hand." Statesm.'s Man., II, p. 1153.

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ticians knew how to make his character, with its texture of brass, the battering ram with which to break down the last ramparts which opposed their rule. Van Buren's election. was the last and strongest manifestation of this peculiar double nature of Jackson's administration. There was only too good a foundation for the complaint of his opponents, that he had named his successor.1 But the watchword which, with stentorian voice, he gave his party, was now, as it had often been before, whispered into his own ear.

The external appearance of the two men was perfectly in keeping with the attitude which they ostensibly assumed towards each other and towards the party. The picture of the rising and of the setting sun symbolized them very badly. Rather did they suggest to the mind the little urchin Evening Star, led and supported by the strong hand of the parent Sun, of Hebel's poem-Jackson, a man with a tall, lean form, erect and straight, his fleshless hand firmly grasping the knob of his walking stick, without the aid of which his stiffened legs and swollen feet refused to move with their wonted certainty, every wrinkle of his long, sharply cut face carved as it were in granite, his large eyes behind his bushy eye-brows beaming with undiminished brightness spite of his spectacles, his white but still plentiful hair bristling up from his perpendicular forehead — Van Buren, on the other hand, reaching only precisely the middle height, in blameless toilette, his smooth snow-white shirtbosom in complete harmony with his round face, carefully shaved with the exception of very decent side-whiskers, his

'H. Clay to Fr. Brooke. Wash., Dec. 19, 1836. "If a president may name his successor, and bring the whole machinery of the government, including its one hundred thousand dependents, into the canvass; and if by such means he achieves a victory, such a fatal precedent as this must be rebuked and reversed, or there is an end of the freedom of election. No one doubts that this has been done." Priv. Corresp. of H. Clay, p. 409.

large double chin finding a pleasant support on his broad black cravat; the only characteristic folds proceeding from his fleshy underlip: a settled smile in which a studied, obliging manner, native good-nature and shrewdness have equal shares; in his bright-colored, vivacious, twinkling eyes, the same qualities to be read; a round high forehead, which appears higher still from the absence of hair on the crown, and bears evidence of endowments without, however, wearing the stamp of the thinker; a friendly, well-meaning bourgeois, in whom the largest and best part of simplicity and honesty are scarcely much more than skin-deep, in opposition to which the diplomatic reserve is more than a thin varnish, laboriously acquired by the parvenu. His wide mouth is certainly able in speech, but it is still better skilled in the art of a silence conscious of its object. The man understands how to wait without manifesting the least sign of impatience; but he will never walk away from a mark which he has once aimed at, and he thinks himself good enough for the best. Even if his temperament should not preserve him from palpable misdeeds, he would never become guilty of them, because he is wise enough to know that they would be irreparable mistakes. With happy facility, he reconciles himself to the most different convictions and parts, and even to those of the man sure of himself and rooted in principle. He does not urge his boat onward by the powerful oar-strokes of his own arm, but he knows where to find a proper rag as a sail to catch every wind that blows. Yet even the storm does not terrify him when he discovers, by his always cool process of calculation, that it will not presumably last so long but that he may consider himself safe from all serious danger. For no object can he risk everything, for, in the last analysis, he never cares for an idea; always for himself and for himself alone. Not what he strove for, but how he strove to attain his end, gave it to

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him to leave behind him the long road which separated the son of the peasant inn-keeper from the president of the United States. In place of the policy of ends, he puts the policy of means. He did not climb to the height of the statesman, but neither did he descend into the depths of real demagogism. From the very first to the last, he remained in that characterless middle, in the shallow stagnant water of trading politics. So far as his own personal interest permitted, he would gladly have carried out some of his political ideas, and he had at least one really statesmanlike thought; but the propelling forces in him were never moral powers which he served for their own sake.

It was in keeping, not only with the position of ruler which Jackson had assumed for eight years in the party, but also with Van Buren's own most real nature, that he entered on the presidency without any programme of his own. As his opponents and the masses of his own party looked

The "New York Evening Post" thus characterizes him in 1841: "Mr. Van Buren has little moral faith of any kind; barely enough to need no artificial excitation of body or mind. This deficiency drives him into an artificial code of political practice, in which he refers all social actions to individual interests, and all political actions to combinations of those interests. He believes firmly in the force of management, or the cool, considerate, artful application of general propositions to the existing temper and opinions of the masses, as far as these can be ascertained, and without any leading reference to their propriety or durability. His generalization of social phenomena never reaches so far as to a moral power, or necessary truth in public opinion; but he simply deals with the collective opinions of men, as manifested by the representatives, or otherwise conspicuous individuals from or among the people, by means of certain easy rules analogous to addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in arithmetic. He belongs wholly to the present time, and may be said to represent trading or business politics. He is the very impersonation of party in its strictest features of formal discipline and exclusive combination. He is ceremonious, polite, reserved in manner, very small, and extremely neat in person." Mackenzie, The Lives and Opinions of B. F'. Butler and Jesse Hoyt, p. 44.