CHAPTER XI EX-PRESIDENT.--SLAVERY.--TEXAS ANNEXATION.--DEFEAT BY THE SOUTH.--FREE-SOIL CAMPAIGN.--LAST YEARS
Van Buren loitered at Washington a few days after his presidency was over, and on his way home stopped at Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. At New York he was finely welcomed. Amid great crowds he was taken to the City Hall in a procession headed by Captain Brown's corps of lancers and a body of armed firemen. He reached Kinderhook on May 15, 1841, there to make his home until his death. He had, after the seemly and pleasing fashion of many men in American public life, lately purchased, near this village among the hills of Columbia county, the residence of William P. Van Ness, where Irving had thirty years before lived in seclusion after the death of his betrothed, and had put the last touches to his Knickerbocker. It was an old estate, whose lands had been rented for twenty years and under cultivation for a hundred and sixty, and from which Van Buren now managed to secure a profit. To this seat he gave the name of Lindenwald, a name which in secret he probably hoped the American people would come to group with Monticello, Montpellier, and the Hermitage. But this could not be. Van Buren had served but half the presidential term of honor. He was not a sage, but still a candidate for the presidency. Before the electoral votes were counted in 1841, Benton declared for his renomination in 1844; and until the latter year he again held the interesting and powerful but critical place of the probable candidate of his party for the presidency. He remained easily the chief figure in the Democratic ranks. His defeat had not taken from him that honor which is the property of the statesman standing for a cause whose righteousness and promise belong to the assured future. His defeat signified no personal, no political fault. It had come to him from a widespread convulsion for which, perhaps less than any great American of his time, he was responsible. His party could not abandon its battle for a limited and non-paternal government and against the use of public moneys by private persons. It could not therefore abandon him; for more than any other man who had not now finally retired he represented these causes in his own person. But his easy composure of manner did not altogether hide that eating and restless anxiety which so often attends the supreme ambition of the American.
Two days after leaving the White House, Van Buren said, in reply to complimentary resolutions of the legislature of Missouri, that he did not utterly lament the bitter attacks upon him; for experience had taught him that few political men were praised by their foes until they were about abandoning their friends. With a pleasing frankness he admitted that to be worthy of the presidency and to reach it had been the object of his "most earnest desire;" but he said that the selection of the next Democratic candidate must be decided by its probable effect upon the principles for which they had just fought, and not upon any supposition that he had been wounded or embittered by his defeat in their defense. His description of a candidate meant himself, however, and rightly enough. In November, 1841, he wrote of the "apparent success of last year's buffoonery;" and intimated that, though he would take no step to be a candidate, it was not true that he had said he should decline a nomination.
Early in 1842, the ex-President made a trip through the South, in company with James K. Paulding, visiting on his return Clay at Ashland, and Jackson at the Hermitage. He was one of the very few men on personally friendly terms with both those long-time enemies. At Ashland, doubtless, Texas was talked over, even if a bargain were not made, as has been fancied, that Clay and Van Buren should remove the troublesome question from politics. In a fashion very different from that of modern candidates, he now wrote, from time to time, able, long, and explicit, but somewhat tedious letters on political questions. In one of them he touched protection more clearly than ever before. He favored, he said in February, 1843, a tariff for revenue only; the "incidental protection" which that must give many American manufacturers was all the protection which should be permitted; the mechanics and laborers had been the chief sufferers from a "high protective tariff." He was at last and definitely "a low tariff man." He declared that he should support the Democratic candidate of 1844; for he believed it to be impossible that a selection from that source should not accord with his views. He did not perhaps realize to how extreme a test his sincerity would be put. He added words which four years later read strangely enough. "My name and pretensions," he said, "however subordinate in importance, shall never be at the disposal of any person whatever, for the purpose of creating distractions or divisions in the Democratic party."
The party was indeed known as the "Van Buren party" until 1844, so nearly universal was the supposition that he was to be renominated, and so plainly was he its leader. The disasters which had now overtaken the Whigs made his return to power seem probable enough. The utterly incongruous elements held together during the sharp discontent and wonderful but inarticulate enthusiasm of 1840 had quickly fallen apart. While on his way to Kinderhook Van Buren was the chief figure in the obsequies at New York of his successful competitor. This honest man, of whom John Quincy Adams said, with his usual savage exaggeration, that his dull sayings were repeated for wit and his grave inanity passed off for wisdom, had already quarreled with the splendid leader whose place he was too conscious of usurping. Tyler's accession was the first, but not the last illustration, which American politicians have had of the danger of securing the presidency by an award of the second place to a known opponent of the principles whose success they seek. Tyler had not before his nomination concealed his narrow and Democratic views of government. The Whigs had ostentatiously refused to declare any principles when they nominated him. In technical conscientiousness he marched with a step by no means cowardly to unhonored political isolation, as a quarter of a century later marched another vice-president nominated by a party in whose ranks he too was a new recruit.
Upon Tyler's veto of the bill for a national bank, an outcry of agony went up from the Whigs; the whole cabinet, except Webster, resigned; a new cabinet was formed, partly from the Conservatives; and by 1844, Tyler was a forlorn candidate for the Democratic nomination, which he claimed for his support of the annexation of Texas.
Upon this first of the great pro-slavery movements Van Buren was defeated for the Democratic nomination in 1844, although it seemed assured to him by every consideration of party loyalty, obligation, and wise foresight. The relations of government to private business ceased to be the dominant political question a few months and only a few months too soon to enable Van Buren to complete his eight years. Slavery arose in place of economics.
No mistake is more common in the review of American history than to suppose that slavery was an active or definite force in organized American politics after the Missouri Compromise and before the struggle for the annexation of Texas under Tyler's administration. The appeals of the abolitionists to the simpler and deeper feelings of humanity were indeed at work before 1835; and from that year on they were profoundly stirring the American conscience and storing up tremendous moral energy. But slavery was not in partisan politics. In 1836 and 1840 there was upon slavery no real difference between the utterances of the candidates and other leaders, Whig and Democratic, whether North or South. Van Buren was supported by many abolitionists; the profoundest distrust of him was at the South. Upon no question touching slavery with which the president could have concern, did his opinions or his utterances differ from those of John Quincy Adams. Clay said in November, 1838, that the abolitionists denounced him as a slaveholder and the slaveholders denounced him as an abolitionist, while both united on Van Buren. The charge of truckling to the South, traditionally made against Van Buren, is justified by no utterance or act different from those made by all American public men of distinction at the time, except perhaps in two instances,—his vote as vice-president for Kendall's bill against sending inflammatory abolition circulars through the post-office to States which prohibited their circulation, and his approval of the rules in the Senate and House for tabling or refusing abolition petitions without reading them. But neither of these, as has been shown, was a decisive test. In the first case he met a political trick; and for his vote there was justly much to be said on the reason of the thing, apart from Southern wishes. As late as 1848, Webster, in criticising Van Buren's inconsistency, would say no more of the law than that it was one "of very doubtful propriety;" and declared that he himself should agree to legislation by Congress to protect the South "from incitements to insurrection." In the second case Van Buren's position in public life might of itself properly restrain him from acquiescing in an agitation in Congress for measures which, with all responsible public men, Adams included, he believed Congress ought not to pass.
The Democratic convention was to meet in May, 1844. The delegates had been very generally instructed for Van Buren; and two months before it assembled his nomination seemed beyond doubt. But the slave States were now fired with a barbarous enthusiasm to extend slavery by annexing Texas. To this Van Buren was supposed to be hostile. His Southern opponents, in February, 1843, skillfully procured from Jackson, innocent of the plan, a strong letter in favor of the annexation, to be used, it was said, just before the convention, "to blow Van out of water." The letter was first published in March, 1844. Van Buren was at once put to a crucial test. His administration had been adverse to annexation; his opinion was still adverse. But a large, and not improbably a controlling section of his party, aided by Jackson's wonderful prestige, deemed it the most important of political causes. Van Buren was, according to the plan, explicitly asked by a Southern delegate to state, with distinct reference to the action of the convention, what were his opinions.
The ex-President deeply desired the nomination; and the nomination seemed conditioned upon his surrender. It was at least assured if he now gave no offense to the South. But he did not flinch. He resorted to no safe generalizations. His views upon the annexation were, he admitted, different from those of many friends, political and personal; but in 1837 his administration after a careful consideration had decided against annexation of the State whose independence had lately been recognized by the United States; the situation had not changed; immediate annexation would place a weapon in the hands of those who looked upon Americans and American institutions with distrustful and envious eyes, and would do us far more real and lasting injury than the new territory, however valuable, could repair. He intimated that there was jobbery in some of the enthusiasm for the annexation. The argument that England might acquire Texas was without force; when England sought in Texas more than the usual commercial favors, it would be time for the United States to interfere. He was aware, he said, of the hazard to which he exposed his standing with his Southern fellow-citizens, "of whom it was aptly and appropriately said by one of their own number that 'they are the children of the sun and partake of its warmth.'" But whether we stand or fall, he said, it is always true wisdom as well as true morality to hold fast to the truth. If to nourish enthusiasm were one of the effects of a genial climate, it seldom failed to give birth to a chivalrous spirit. To preserve our national escutcheon untarnished had always been the unceasing solicitude of Southern statesmen. The only tempering he gave his refusal was to say that if, after the subject had been fully discussed, a Congress chosen with reference to the question showed the popular will to favor it, he would yield.[18] Van Buren thus closed his letter: "Nor can I in any extremity be induced to cast a shade over the motives of my past life, by changes or concealments of opinions maturely formed upon a great national question, for the unworthy purpose of increasing my chances for political promotion."
To a presidential candidate the eve of a national convention is dim with the self-deceiving twilight of sophistry; and the twilight deepens when a question is put upon which there is a division among those who are, or who may be, his supporters. He can keep silence, he can procure the questioning friend to withdraw the troublesome inquiry; he can ignore the question from an enemy; he can affect an enigmatical dignity. Van Buren did neither of these. His Texas letter was one of the finest and bravest pieces of political courage, and deserves from Americans a long admiration.
The danger of Van Buren's difference with Jackson it was sought to avert. Butler visited Jackson at the Hermitage, and doubtless showed him for what a sinister end he had been used. Jackson did not withdraw his approval of annexation; but publicly declared his regard for Van Buren to be so great, his confidence in Van Buren's love of country to be so strengthened by long intimacy, that no difference about Texas could change his opinions. Van Buren's nomination was again widely supposed to be assured. But the work of Calhoun and Robert J. Walker had been too well done. The convention met at Baltimore on May 27, 1844. George Bancroft headed the delegation from Massachusetts. Before the Rev. Dr. Johns had "fervently addressed the Throne of Grace" or the Rev. Mr. McJilton had "read a scripture lesson," the real contest took place over the adoption of the rule requiring a two thirds vote for a nomination. For it was through this rule that enough Southern members, chosen before Van Buren's letter as they had been, were to escape obedience to their instructions to vote for him. Robert J. Walker, then a senator from Mississippi, a man of interesting history and large ability, led the Southerners. He quoted the precedent of 1832, when Van Buren had been nominated for the vice-presidency under the two thirds rule, and that of 1835, when he had been nominated for the presidency. These nominations had led to victory. In 1840 the rule had not been adopted. Without this rule, he said amid angry excitement, the party would yield to those whose motto seemed to be "rule or ruin." Butler, Daniel S. Dickinson, and Marcus Morton led the Northern ranks. Butler regretted that any member should condescend to the allusion to 1840. That year, he said, had been a debauchery of the nation's reason amid log cabins, hard cider, and coon-skins; and in an ecstasy of painful excitement at the recollection and amid a tremendous burst of applause "he leaped from the floor and stamped ... as if treading beneath his feet the object of his loathing." The true Democratic rule, he continued, required the minority to submit to the majority. Morton said that under the majority rule Jefferson had been nominated; that rule had governed state, county, and township conventions. Butler admitted that under the rule Van Buren would not be nominated, although a majority of the convention was known to be for him. In 1832 and 1835 the two thirds rule had prevailed because it was certainly known who would be nominated; and the rule operated to aid not to defeat the majority. If the rule were adopted, it would be by the votes of States which were not Democratic, and would bring "dismemberment and final breaking up of the party." Walker laughed at Butler's "tall vaulting" from the floor; and, refusing to shrink from the Van Buren issue, he protested against New York dictation, and warningly said that, if Van Buren were nominated, Clay would be elected. After the convention had received with enthusiasm a floral gift from a Democratic lady whom the President declared to be fairer than the flowers, the vote was taken. The two thirds rule was adopted by 148 to 118. All the negatives were Northerners, except 14 from Missouri, Maryland, and North Carolina. Fifty-eight true "Northern men with Southern principles" joined ninety Southerners in the affirmative. It was really a vote on Van Buren,—or rather upon the annexation of Texas,—or rather still upon the extension of American slave territory. It was the first battle, a sort of Bull Run, in the last and great political campaign between the interests of slavery and those of freedom.
On the first ballot for the candidate, Van Buren had 146 votes, 13 more than a majority. If after the vote on the two thirds rule anything more were required to show that some of these votes were given in mere formal obedience to instructions, the second ballot brought the proof. Van Buren then sank to 127, less than a majority; and on the seventh ballot to 99. A motion was made to declare him the nominee as the choice of a majority of the convention; and there followed a scene of fury, the President bawling for order amid savage taunts between North and South, and bitter denunciations of the treachery of some of those who had pledged themselves for Van Buren. Samuel Young of New York declared the "abominable Texas question" to be the fire-brand thrown among them by the "mongrel administration at Washington," whose hero was now doubtless fiddling while Rome was burning. Nero seems to have been Calhoun, though between the god-like young devil of antiquity wreathed with sensual frenzy and infamy, and the solemn, even saturnine figure of the great modern advocate of human slavery, the likeness seemed rather slight. The motion was declared out of order; and the name of James K. Polk was presented as that of "a pure whole-hogged Democrat." On the eighth ballot he had 44 votes. Then followed the magnanimous scene of "union and harmony" which has so often, after a conflict, charmed a political body into unworthy surrender. The great delegation from New York retired during the ninth balloting; and returned to a convention profoundly silent but thrilling with that bastard sense of coming glory in which a lately tumultuous and quarreling body waits the solution of its difficulties already known to be reached but not yet declared. Butler quoted a letter which Van Buren had given him authorizing the withdrawal of his name if it were necessary for harmony; he eulogized Polk as a strict constructionist, and closed by reading a letter from Jackson fervently urging Van Buren's nomination. Daniel S. Dickinson said that "he loved this convention because it had acted so like the masses," and cast New York's 35 votes for Polk. The latter's nomination was declared with the utmost joy, and sent to Washington over Morse's first telegraph line, just completed. Silas Wright of New York, Van Buren's strong friend and a known opponent of annexation, was, in the fashion since followed, nominated for the vice-presidency, to soothe the feelings and the conscience of the defeated. Wright peremptorily telegraphed his refusal. He told his friends that he did "not choose to ride behind on the black pony." George M. Dallas of Pennsylvania took his place.
The Democratic party now threw away all advantage of the issue made by the undeserved defeat four years before. Thirty-six years later it repeated the blunder in discarding Van Buren's famous neighbor and disciple. Polk's was the first nomination by the party of a man of the second or of even a lower rank. Polk was known to have ability inferior not only to that of Van Buren and Calhoun, but to Cass, Buchanan, Wright, and others. He was the first presidential "dark horse," and indeed hardly that. His own State of Tennessee had, by resolution, presented him as its choice for vice-president with Van Buren in the first place. He had been speaker of the national House, and later, governor of his State; but since holding these places had been twice defeated for governor. In accepting the nomination he declared, with an apparent fling at Van Buren, that, if elected, he should not accept a renomination, and should thus enable the party in 1848 to make "a free selection."
The nomination aroused disgust enough. "Polk! Great God, what a nomination!" Letcher, the Whig governor of Kentucky, wrote to Buchanan. But the experiment of 1840 with the Whigs had been disastrous; the people had swung back to the strict doctrines of the Democracy. Van Buren faithfully kept his promise to support the nomination; under his urgency Wright finally accepted the nomination for governor of New York. And by the vote of New York Henry Clay was defeated by a man vastly his inferior. Polk had 5000 plurality in that State; but Wright had 10,000. Had not James G. Birney, the abolitionist candidate who polled there 15,812 votes, been in the field, not even Van Buren's party loyalty would have prevented Clay's election. Van Buren's friends saved the State; but in doing so voted for annexation. In April, 1844, Clay had written a letter against annexation. As it appeared within a few days of Van Buren's letter, and as the personal relations between the two great party leaders were most friendly, some have inferred an arrangement between them to take the question out of politics. This would indeed have been an extraordinary occurrence. One might well wish to have overheard a negotiation between two rivals for the presidency to exclude a great question distasteful to both. After the Democratic convention, Tyler's treaty of annexation was rejected in the Senate by 35 to 16, six Democrats from the North, among them Wright of New York and Benton of Missouri, voting against it. During the campaign Clay had weakly abandoned even the mild emphasis of his first opposition, and by flings at the abolitionists had openly bid for the pro-slavery vote; thus perhaps losing enough votes in New York to Birney to defeat him. After the election the current for annexation seemed too strong; and a resolution passed both Houses authorizing the admission of Texas as a State. The resolution provided for the formation of four additional States out of Texas. In any such additional State formed north of the Missouri compromise line, slavery was to be prohibited; but in those south of it slavery was to be permitted or prohibited as the inhabitants might choose.
Slavery was now clearly before the political conscience of the nation. Van Buren was the conspicuous victim of the first encounter. The Baltimore convention had in its platform complimented "their illustrious fellow-citizen," "his inflexible fidelity to the Constitution," his "ability, integrity, and firmness," and had tendered to him, "in honorable retirement," the assurance of the deeply-seated "confidence, affection, and respect of the American Democracy." This sentence to "honorable retirement" Van Buren, who was only in his sixty-second year and in the amplitude of his natural powers, received with outward complacency. On the eve of the election he pointed out, probably referring to Cass, that the hostility to him had not been in the interest of Polk, and warmly said that, unless the Democratic creed were a delusion, personal feelings ought to be turned to nothing. Van Buren was, however, profoundly affected by what he deemed the undeserved Southern hostility to himself. For he hardly yet appreciated that his defeat was politically legitimate, and not the result of political treachery or envy. Between him and the Southern politicians had opened a true and deep division over the greatest single question in American politics since Jefferson's election.
With Polk's accession and the Mexican war, the schism in the Democratic ranks over the extension of American slave territory became plainer. Even during the canvass of 1844 a circular had been issued by William Cullen Bryant, David Dudley Field, John W. Edmonds, and other Van Buren men, supporting Polk, but urging the choice of congressmen opposed to annexation. Early in the new administration the division of New York Democrats into "Barnburners" and "Old Hunkers" appeared. The former were the strong pro-Van Buren, anti-Texas men, or "radical Democrats," who were likened to the farmer who burned his barn to clear it of rats. The latter were the "Northern men with Southern principles," the supporters of annexation, and the respectable, dull men of easy consciences, who were said to hanker after the offices. The Barnburners were led by men of really eminent ability and exalted character: Silas Wright, then governor, Benjamin F. Butler, John A. Dix, chosen in 1845 to the United States Senate, Azariah C. Flagg, the famous comptroller, and John Van Buren, the ex-President's son, and a singularly picturesque figure in politics, who was, in 1845, made attorney-general by the legislature. He had been familiarly called "Prince John" since his travels abroad during his father's presidency. Daniel S. Dickinson and William L. Marcy were the chief figures in the Hunker ranks. Polk seemed inclined, at the beginning, to favor, or at least to placate, the Barnburners. He offered the Treasury to Wright, though he is said to have known that Wright could not leave the governorship. He offered Butler the War Department, but the latter's devotion to his profession, for which he had resigned the attorney-general's place in Van Buren's cabinet, made him prefer the freedom of the United States attorneyship at New York, and Marcy was finally given the New York place in the cabinet. Jackson's death in June, 1845, deprived the Van Buren men of the tremendous moral weight which his name carried, and which might have daunted Polk. It perhaps also helped to loosen the weight of party ties on the Van Buren men. After this the schism rapidly grew. In the fall election of 1845 the Barnburners pretty thoroughly controlled the Democratic party of the State in hostility to the Mexican war, which the annexation of Texas had now brought. Samuel J. Tilden of Columbia county, and a profound admirer of Van Buren, became one of their younger leaders.
Now arose the strife over the "Wilmot Proviso," in which was embodied the opposition to the extension of slavery into new Territories. Upon this proviso the modern Republican party was formed eight years later; upon it, fourteen years later, Abraham Lincoln was chosen president; and upon it began the war for the Union, out of whose throes came the vastly grander and unsought beneficence of complete emancipation. David Wilmot was a Democratic member of Congress from Pennsylvania; in New York he would have been a Barnburner. In 1846 a bill was pending to appropriate $3,000,000 for use by the President in a purchase of territory from Mexico as part of a peace. Wilmot proposed an amendment that slavery should be excluded from any territory so acquired. All the Democratic members, as well as the Whigs from New York, and most strongly the Van Buren or Wright men, supported the proviso. The Democratic legislature approved it by the votes of the Whigs with the Barnburners and the Soft Hunkers, the latter being Hunkers less friendly to slavery. It passed the House at Washington, but was rejected by the Senate, not so quickly open to popular sentiment. In the Democratic convention of New York, in October, 1846, the "war for the extension of slavery" was charged by the Barnburners on the Hunkers. The former were victorious, and Silas Wright was renominated for governor, to be defeated, however, at the election. Polk, Marcy, and Dickinson, angered at the Democratic opposition in New York to the pro-slavery Mexican policy, now threw all the weight of federal patronage against the Barnburners, many of whom believed the administration to have been responsible for Wright's defeat. Van Buren and his influence were completely separated from the national administration. Just before the adjournment of Congress in 1847, the appropriation to secure territory from Mexico was again proposed. Again the Wilmot Proviso was added in the House; again it was rejected in the Senate, to the defeat of the appropriation; and again Barnburners and Whigs carried in the New York legislature a resolution approving it, and directing the New York senators to support it.
The tide was rising. It seemed that Mexican law prohibited slavery in New Mexico and California, and that upon their cession the principles of international law would preserve their condition of freedom. Benton, therefore, deemed the Wilmot Proviso unnecessary; a "thing of nothing in itself, and seized upon to conflagrate the States and dissolve the Union." For the Supreme Court had not then pronounced slavery a necessary accompaniment of American supremacy. But the legal protection of freedom was practically unsubstantial, even if not technical; there could be no doubt of the determination of the South to carry slavery into these Territories, whatever might be the obligations of either municipal or international law; and their conquest, therefore, made imminent a decision of the vital question whether slavery should be still further extended.
At the Democratic convention at Syracuse, in September, 1847, the Hunkers, after a fierce struggle over contested seats, seized control of the body. David Dudley Field, for the Barnburners, proposed a resolution that, although the Democracy of New York would faithfully adhere to the compromises of the Constitution and maintain the reserved rights of the States, they would still declare, since the crisis had come, "their uncompromising hostility to the extension of slavery into territory now free." This was defeated. The Barnburners then seceded, and issued an address, in which Lawrence Van Buren, the ex-President's brother, joined. They protested that the anti-slavery resolution had been defeated by a fraudulent organization of the convention, and called a mass meeting at Herkimer, on October 26, "to avow their principles and consult as to future action." The Herkimer convention was really an important preliminary to the formation of the modern Republican party. It was a gathering of the ex-President's friends. Cambreleng, his old associate, presided; David Wilmot addressed the meeting; and John Van Buren, now very conspicuous in politics, reported the resolutions. In these the fraud at Syracuse was again denounced; a convention was called for Washington's birthday in 1848, to choose Barnburner delegates to contest the seats of those chosen by the Hunkers in the national Democratic convention. It was declared that the freemen of New York would not submit to slavery in the conquered provinces; and that, against the threat of Democrats at the South that they would support no candidate for the presidency who did not assent to the extension of slavery, the Democrats of New York would proclaim their determination to vote for no candidate who did so assent.
It was clear that Van Buren sympathized with all this. Relieved from the constraint of power, there strongly revived his old hostility to slavery; he recalled his vote twenty-eight years before against admitting Missouri otherwise than free. He now perceived how profound had really been the political division between him and the Southern Democrats when, in 1844, he wrote his Texas letter. Ignoring the legitimate character of the politics of Polk's administration in denying official recognition or reward to Barnburners,—legitimate if, as Van Buren had himself pretty uniformly maintained, patronage should go to friends rather than enemies, and if, as was obvious, there had arisen a true political division upon principles,—Van Buren was now touched with anger at the proscription of his friends. Excluded from the power which ought to have belonged to the chief of Democrats enjoying even in "honorable retirement" the "confidence, affection, and respect" of his party, independence rapidly grew less heinous in his eyes. One can hardly doubt that there now more freely welled up in his mind, to clarify its vision, the sense of personal wrong which, since Polk's nomination, had been so long held in magnanimous and dignified restraint,—though of this he was probably unconscious. Van Buren was not insincere when, in October, 1847, he wrote from Lindenwald to an enthusiastic Democratic editor in Pennsylvania, who had hoisted his name to the top of his columns for 1848. Whatever, he said, had been his aspirations in the past, he now had no desire to be President; every day confirmed him in the political opinions to which he had adhered. Conscious of always having done his duty to the people to the best of his ability, he had "no heart burnings to be allayed and no resentments to be gratified by a restoration of power." Life at Lindenwald was entirely adapted to his taste; and he was (so he wrote, and so doubtless he had forced himself to think) "sincerely and heartily desirous to wear the honors and enjoyments of private life uninterruptedly to the end." If tendered a unanimous Democratic support with the assurance of the election it would bring, he should not "hesitate respectfully and gratefully, but decidedly to decline it," adding, however, the proviso so precious to public men, "consulting only my own feelings and wishes." It was in the last degree improbable, he said,—and so it was,—that any emergency should arise in which this indulgence of his own preferences would, in the opinion of his true and faithful friends, conflict with his duty to the party to which his whole life had been devoted, and to which he owed any personal sacrifice. The Mexican war had, he said, been so completely sanctioned by the government that it must be carried through; and, he ominously added, the propriety of thereafter instituting inquiries into the necessity of its occurrence, so as to fix the just responsibility to public opinion of public servants, was then out of season. Not a word of praise did he speak of Polk's administration; in this he was for once truly and grimly "non-committal."
In the New York canvass of 1847, the Barnburners, after their secession, "talked of indifferent matters." The Whigs were therefore completely successful. In the legislature the Barnburners, or "Free-soilers" as they began to be called, outnumbered the Hunkers. Dickinson proposed in the Senate at Washington a resolution, the precursor of Douglas's "squatter sovereignty,"—that all questions concerning the domestic policy of the Territories should be left to their legislatures to be chosen by their people. Lewis Cass, now the coming candidate of the South, asserted in December, 1847, the same proposition, pointing out that, if Congress could abolish the relation of master and servant in the Territories, it might in like manner treat the relation of husband and wife. After this "Nicholson letter" of his, Cass might well have been asked whether he would have approved the admission of a State where the last relation was forbidden, and where concubinage existed as a "domestic institution." Dickinson's proposal meant that the first settlers of each Territory should determine it to freedom or to slavery; it meant that in admitting new States the nation ought to be indifferent to their laws on slavery. If slavery were a mere incident in the polity of the State, a matter of taste or convenience, the proposition would have been true enough. But euphemistic talk about "domestic institutions" blinded none but theorists or lovers of slavery to the truth that slavery was a fearful and barbarous power, and that it must become paramount in any new Southern State, monstrous and corrupting in its tendencies towards savagery, unyielding, wasteful, and ruinous,—a power whose corruption and savagery, whose waste and ruin, debauched and enfeebled all communities closely allied to the States which maintained it,—a power in whose rapid growth, in whose affirmative and dictatorial arrogance, and in the intellectual ability and even the moral excellences of the aristocracy which administered it at the South, there was an appalling menace. As well might one propose the admission to political intimacy and national unity of a State whose laws encouraged leprosy or required the funeral oblations of the suttee. If there were already slave States in the confederacy, it was no less true that the nation had profoundly suffered from their slavery. Nor could all the phrases of constitutional lawyers make the slave-block, the black laws, and all the practices of this barbarism mere local peculiarities, distasteful perhaps to the North but not concerning it, peculiarities to be ranked with laws of descent or judicial procedure. Cass and Dickinson for their surrender to the South were now called "dough-faces" and "slavocrats" by the Democratic Free-soilers. They were the true "Northern men with Southern principles."
The Barnburners met at Utica on February 16, an earlier day than that first appointed, John Van Buren again being the chief figure. The convention praised John A. Dix for supporting the Wilmot Proviso; and declared that Benton, a senator from a slave State, but now a sturdy opponent of extending the evil, and long the warm friend and admirer of Van Buren, had "won a proud preËminence among the statesmen of the day." Delegates were chosen to the national convention to oppose the Hunkers. In April, 1848, the Barnburner members of the legislature issued an address, the authors of which were long afterwards disclosed by Samuel J. Tilden to be himself and Martin and John Van Buren. At great length it demonstrated the Free-soil principles of the Democratic fathers.
The national convention assembled in May, 1848. It offered to admit the Barnburner and Hunker delegations together to cast the vote of the State. The Barnburners rejected the compromise as a simple nullification of the vote of the State, and then withdrew. Lewis Cass was nominated for president, the Wilmot Proviso being thus emphatically condemned. For Cass had declared in favor of letting the new Territories themselves decide upon slavery. The Barnburners, returning to a great meeting in the City Hall Park at New York, cried, "The lash has resounded through the halls of the Capitol!" and condemned the cowardice of Northern senators who had voted with the South. Among the letters read was one from Franklin Pierce, who had in 1844 voted against annexation, a letter which years afterwards was, with a reference to his famous friend and biographer, called the "Scarlet Letter." The delegates issued an address written by Tilden, fearlessly calling Democrats to independent action. In June a Barnburner convention met at Utica. Its president, Samuel Young, who had refused at the convention at Baltimore in 1844 to vote for Polk when the rest of his delegation surrendered, said that if the convention did its duty, a clap of political thunder would in November "make the propagandists of slavery shake like Belshazzar." Butler, John Van Buren, and Preston King, afterwards a Republican senator, were there. David Dudley Field read an explicit declaration from the ex-President against the action and the candidates of the national convention. This letter, whose prolixity is an extreme illustration of Van Buren's literary fault, created a profound impression. He declared his "unchangeable determination never again to be a candidate for public office." The requirement by the national convention that the New York delegates should pledge themselves to vote for any candidate who might be nominated was, he said, an indignity of the rankest character. The Virginia delegates had been permitted, without incurring a threat of exclusion, to declare that they would not support a certain nominee. The convention had not allowed the Democrats of New York fair representation, and its acts did not therefore bind them.
The point of political regularity, when discussed upon a technical basis, was, however, by no means clear. The real question was whether the surrender of the power of Congress over the Territories, and the refusal to use that power to exclude slavery, accorded with Democratic principles. On this Van Buren was most explicit. Jefferson had proposed freedom for the Northwest Territories; and all the representatives from the slaveholding States had voted for the ordinance. Not only Washington and the elder and younger Adams had signed bills imposing freedom as the condition of admitting new Territories or States, but those undoubted Democrats, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson, had signed such bills; and so had he himself in 1838 in the case of Iowa. This power of Congress was part of "the compromises of the Constitution," compromises which, "deeply penetrated" as he had been "by the convictions that slavery was the only subject that could endanger our blessed Union," he had, he was aware, gone further to sustain against Northern attacks than many of his best friends approved. He would go no further. As the national convention had rejected this old doctrine of the Democracy, he should not vote for its candidate, General Cass; and if there were no other candidate but General Taylor, he should not vote for president. If our ancestors, when the opinion and conduct of the world about slavery were very different, had rescued from slavery the territory now making five great States, should we, he asked, in these later days, after the gigantic efforts of Great Britain for freedom, and when nearly all mankind were convinced of its evils, doom to slavery a territory from which as many more new States might be made. He counseled moderation and forbearance, but still a firm resistance to injustice.
This powerful declaration from the old chief of the Democracy was decisive with the convention. Van Buren was nominated for president, and Henry Dodge, a Democratic senator of Wisconsin, for vice-president. Dodge, however, declined, proud though he would be, as he said, to have his name under other circumstances associated with Van Buren's. But his State had been represented in the Baltimore convention; and as one of its citizens he cordially concurred in the nomination of Cass. A national convention was called to meet at Buffalo on August 9, 1848.
Charles Francis Adams, the son of John Quincy Adams, presided at the Buffalo convention; and in it Joshua R. Giddings, the famous abolitionist, and Salmon P. Chase were conspicuous. To the unspeakable horror of every Hunker there participated in the deliberations a negro, the Rev. Mr. Ward. Butler reported the resolutions in words whose inspiration is still fresh and ringing. They were assembled, it was said, "to secure free soil for a free people;" the Democratic and Whig organizations had been dissolved, the one by stifling the voice of a great constituency, the other by abandoning its principles for mere availability. Remembering the example of their fathers in the first declaration of independence, they now, putting their trust in God, planted themselves on the national platform of freedom in opposition to the sectional platform of slavery; they proposed no interference with slavery in any State, but its prohibition in the Territories then free; for Congress, they said, had "no more power to make a slave than to make a king." There must be no more compromises with slavery. They accepted the issue forced upon them by the slave power; and to its demand for more slave States and more slave Territories, their calm and final answer was, "no more slave States and no more slave territory." At the close were the stirring and memorable words: "We inscribe on our banner, Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men; and under it we will fight on and fight ever, until a triumphant victory shall reward our exertions."
Joshua Leavitt of Massachusetts, one of the "blackest" of abolitionists, reported to the convention the name of Martin Van Buren for president. After the convention was over, even Gerrit Smith, the ultra-abolitionist candidate, declared that, of all the candidates whom there was the least reason to believe the convention would nominate, Van Buren was his preference. The nomination was enthusiastically made by acclamation, after Van Buren had on an informal ballot received 159 votes to 129 cast for John P. Hale. A brief letter from Van Buren was read, declaring that his nomination at Utica had been against his earnest wishes; that he had yielded because his obligation to the friends, who had now gone so far, required him to abide by their decision that his name was necessary to enable "the ever faithful Democracy of New York to sustain themselves in the extraordinary position into which they have been driven by the injustice of others;" but that the abandonment at Buffalo of his Utica nomination would be most satisfactory to his feelings and wishes. The exclusion of slavery from the Territories was an object, he said, "sacred in the sight of heaven, the accomplishment of which is due to the memories of the great and just men long since, we trust, made perfect in its courts." Charles Francis Adams was nominated for vice-president; and dazzled and incredulous eyes beheld on a presidential ticket with Martin Van Buren the son of one of his oldest and bitterest adversaries. That adversary had died a few months before, the best of his honors being his latest, those won in a querulous but valiant old age, in a fiery fight for freedom.
In September, John A. Dix, then a Democratic senator, accepted the Free-soil nomination for governor of New York. The Democratic party was aghast. The schismatics had suddenly gained great dignity and importance. Martin Van Buren, the venerable leader of the party, its most famous and distinguished member, this courtly, cautious statesman,—could it be he rushing from that "honorable retirement," to whose safe retreat his party had committed him with so deep an affection, to consort with long-haired and wild-eyed abolitionists! He was the arch "apostate," leading fiends of disunion who would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. Where now was his boasted loyalty to the party? Rage struggled with loathing. All the ancient stories told of him by Whig enemies were revived, and believed by those who had long treated them with contempt. It is clear, however, that Van Buren's attitude was in no wise inconsistent with his record. His party had never pronounced for the extension of slavery; nor had he. The Buffalo convention was silent upon abolition in the District of Columbia. There was for the time in politics but one question, and that was born of the annexation of Texas,—Shall slavery go into free territory? As amid the clash of arms the laws are stilled, so in the great fight for human freedom, the independent treasury, the tariff, and internal improvements could no longer divide Americans.
The Whigs had in June nominated Taylor, one of the two heroes of the Mexican war. It is a curious fact that Taylor had been authoritatively sounded by the Free-soil leaders as to an acceptance of their nomination. Clay and Webster were now discarded by their party for this bluff soldier, a Louisiana slaveholder of unknown politics; and with entire propriety and perfect caution the Whigs made no platform. A declaration against the extension of slavery was voted down. Webster said at Marshfield, after indignation at Taylor's nomination had a little worn away, that for "the leader of the Free-spoil party" to "become the leader of the Free-soil party would be a joke to shake his sides and mine." The anti-slavery Whigs hesitated for a time; but Seward of New York and Horace Greeley in the New York "Tribune" finally led most of them to Taylor rather than, as Seward said, engage in "guerrilla warfare" under Van Buren. Whigs must not, he added, leave the ranks because of the Whig affront to Clay and Webster. "Is it not," he finely, though for the occasion sophistically, said, "by popular injustice that greatness is burnished?" This launching of the modern Republican party was, strangely enough, to include in New York few besides Democrats. In November, 1847, the Liberty or Abolition party nominated John P. Hale for president; but upon Van Buren's nomination he was withdrawn.
Upon the popular vote in November, 1848, Van Buren received 291,263 votes, while there were 1,220,544 for Cass and 1,360,099 for Taylor. Van Buren had no electoral votes. In no State did he receive as many votes as Taylor; but in New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont he had more than Cass. The vote of New York was an extraordinary tribute to his personal power; he had 120,510 votes to 114,318 for Cass; and it was clear that nearly all the former came from the Democratic party. In Ohio he had 35,354 votes, most of which were probably drawn from the Whig abolitionists. In Massachusetts he had 38,058 votes, in no small part owing to the early splendor, the moral austerity and elevation of Charles Sumner's eloquence. "It is not," he said, "for the Van Buren of 1838 that we are to vote; but for 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 champion of Freedom." Taylor had 163 electoral votes and Cass 127.
The political career of Van Buren was now ended. It is mere speculation whether he had thought his election a possible thing. That he should think so was very unlikely. Few men had a cooler judgment of political probabilities; few knew better how powerful was party discipline in the Democratic ranks, for no one had done more to create it; few could have appreciated more truly the Whig hatred of himself. Still the wakening rush of moral sentiment was so strong, the bitterness of Van Buren's Ohio and New York supporters had been so great at his defeat in 1844, that it seemed not utterly absurd that those two States might vote for him. If they did, that dream of every third party in America might come true,—the failure of either of the two great parties to obtain a majority in the electoral college, and the consequent choice of president in the House, where each of them might prefer the third party to its greater rival. Ambition to reËnter the White House could indeed have had but the slightest influence with him when he accepted the Free-soil nomination. Nor was his acceptance an act of revenge, as has very commonly been said. The motives of a public man in such a case are subtle and recondite even to himself. No distinguished political leader with strong and publicly declared opinions, however exalted his temper, can help uniting in his mind the cause for which he has fought with his own political fortunes. If he be attacked, he is certain to honestly believe the attack made upon the cause as well as upon himself. When his party drives him from a leadership already occupied by him, he may submit without a murmur; but he will surely harbor the belief that his party is playing false with its principles. In 1848 there was a great and new cause for which Van Buren stood, and upon which his party took the wrong side; but doubtless his zeal burned somewhat hotter, the edge of his temper was somewhat keener, for what he thought the indignities to himself and his immediate political friends. To say this is simply to pronounce him human. His acceptance of the nomination was given largely out of loyalty to those friends whose advice was strong and urgent. It was the mistake which any old leader of a political party, who has enjoyed its honors, makes in the seeming effort—and every such political candidacy at least seems to be such an effort—to gratify his personal ambition at its expense. Van Buren and his friends should have made another take the nomination, to which his support, however vigorous, should have gone sorrowfully and reluctantly; and the form as well as the substance of his relations to the canvass should have been without personal interest.
Had Van Buren died just after the election of 1848 his reputation to-day would be far higher. He had stood firmly, he had suffered politically, for a clear, practical, and philosophical method and limitation of government; he had adhered with strict loyalty to the party committed to this method, until there had arisen the cause of human freedom, which far transcended any question still open upon the method or limits of government. With this cause newly risen, a cause surely not to leave the political field except in victory, he was now closely united. He might therefore have safely trusted to the judgment of later days and of wiser and truer-sighted men, growing in number and influence every year. His offense could never be pardoned by his former associates at the South and their allies at the North. No confession of error, though it were full of humiliation, no new and affectionate return to party allegiance, could make them forget what they sincerely deemed astounding treason and disastrous sacrilege. Loyal remembrance of his incomparable party services had irretrievably gone, to be brought back by no reasoning and by no persuasion. If he were to live, he should not have wavered from his last position. Its righteousness was to be plainer and plainer with the passing years.
Van Buren did live, however, long after his honorable battle and defeat; and lived to dim its honor by the faltering of mistaken patriotism. In 1849, John Van Buren, during the efforts to unite the Democratic party in New York, declared it his wish to make it "the great anti-slavery party of the Union." Early in 1850 and when the compromise was threatened at Washington, he wrote to the Free-soil convention of Connecticut that there had never been a time when the opponents of slavery extension were more urgently called to act with energy and decision or to hold their representatives to a rigid responsibility, if they faltered or betrayed their trust. With little doubt his father approved these utterances. A year later, however, the ex-President, with nearly all Northern men, yielded to the soporific which Clay in his old age administered to the American people. In their support of the great compromise between slavery and freedom, Webster and Clay forfeited much of their fame, and justly. For though the cause of humanity gained a vast political advantage in the admission of California as a free State, the advantage, it was plain, could not have been long delayed had there been no compromise. But the rest of the new territory was thrown into a struggle among its settlers, although the power of Congress over the Territories was not yet denied; and a fugitive-slave law of singular atrocity was passed. All the famous Northern Whigs were now true "doughfaces." Fillmore, president through Taylor's death, one of the most dignified and timid of their number, signed the compromise bills.
The compromise being passed, Van Buren with almost the entire North submissively sought to believe slavery at last expelled from politics. It would have been a wise heroism, it would have given Van Buren a clearer, a far higher place with posterity, if after 1848 he had even done no more than remain completely aloof from the timid politics of the time, if he had at least refused acquiescence in any compromise by which concessions were made to slavery. But he was an old man. He shared with his ancient and famous Whig rivals that intense love and almost adoration of the Union, upon which the arrogant leaders of the South so long and so successfully played. The compromise was accomplished. It would perhaps be the last concession to the furious advance of the cruel barbarism. The free settlers in the new Territories would, he hoped, by their number and hardihood, defeat the incoming slave-owners, and even under "squatter sovereignty" save their homes from slavery. If the Union should now stand without further disturbance, all might still come right without civil war. Economic laws, the inexorable and beneficent progress of civilization, would perhaps begin, slowly indeed but surely, to press to its death this remnant of ancient savagery. But if the Union were to be broken by a violation of the compromise, a vast and irremediable catastrophe and ruin would undo all the patriotic labors of sixty years, would dismiss to lasting unreality the dreams of three generations of great men who had loved their country. It seemed too appalling a responsibility.
Upon all this reasoning there is much unfair modern judgment. The small number of resolute abolitionists, who cared little for the Union in comparison with the one cause of human rights, and whose moral fervor found in the compromises of the Constitution, so dear and sacred to all American statesmen, only a covenant with hell, may for the moment be ignored. Among them there was not a public man occupying politically responsible or widely influential place. The vast body of Northern sentiment was in two great classes. The one was led by men like Seward, and even Benton, who considered the South a great bully. They believed that to a firm front against the extension of slavery the South would, after many fire-eating words, surrender in peace. The other class included most of the influential men of the day, some of them greater men, some lesser, and some little men. Webster, Clay, Cass, Buchanan, Marcy, Douglas, Fillmore, Dickinson, were now joined by Van Buren and by many Free-soil men of 1848 daunted at the seeming slowness with which the divine mills were grinding. They believed that the South, to assert the fancied "rights" of their monstrous wrong, would accept disunion and even more, that in this cause it would fiercely accept all the terrors of a civil war and its limitless devastation. The event proved the first men utterly in the wrong; and it was fortunate that their mistake was not visible until in 1861 the battle was irreversibly joined. The second and more numerous class were right. There had to be yielding, unless such evils were to be let loose, unless Webster's "ideas, so full of all that is horrid and horrible," were to come true. The anxiety not to offend the South was perhaps most strikingly shown after the election of Lincoln. A distinguished statesman of the modern Republican party has recently pointed out[19] that in February, 1861, the Republican members of Congress, and among them Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, acquiesced in the organization of the new Territories of Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada, without any prohibition of slavery, thus ignoring the very principle and the only principle upon which their great battle had been fought and their great victory won.
Complete truth dwelt only with the small and hated abolitionist minority. Without honored and influential leaders in political life they alone saw that war with all these horrors was better, or even a successful secession was better, than further surrender of human rights, a surrender whose corruption and barbarism would cloud all the glories, and destroy all the beneficence of the Union. No historical judgment has been more unjust and partial than the implied condemnation of Van Buren for his acquiescence in Clay's compromise, while only gentle words have chided the great statesmen whose eloquence was more splendid and inspiring but whose devotion to the Union was never more supreme than Van Buren's,—statesmen who had made no sacrifice like his in 1844, who in their whitening years had taken no bold step like his in 1848, and who had in 1850 actively promoted the surrender to which Van Buren did no more than submit after it was accomplished.
In 1852 the overwhelming agreement to the compromise brought on a colorless presidential campaign, fought in a sort of fool's paradise. Its character was well represented by Franklin Pierce, the second Democratic mediocrity raised to the first place in the party and the land, and by the absurd political figure of General Scott, fitly enough the last candidate of the decayed Whig party. Both parties heartily approved the compromise, but it mattered little which of the two candidates were chosen. The votes cast for John P. Hale, the Free-soil candidate, were as much more significant and honorable as they were fewer than those cast for Pierce or Scott. Van Buren, in a note to a meeting in New York, declared that time and circumstances had issued edicts against his attendance, but that he earnestly wished for Pierce's election. He attempted no argument in this, perhaps the shortest political letter he ever wrote. But John Van Buren, in a speech at Albany, gave some reasons which prevent much condemnation of his father's perfunctory acquiescence in the action of his party. The movement of 1848, he said, had been intended to prevent the extension of slavery. Since then, California had come in, a Free State, and not, as the South had desired, a slave State; and "the abolition of the slave market in the District of Columbia was another great point gained." The poverty of reasons was shown in the eager insistence that every member of Congress from New Hampshire had voted against slavery extension, and that the Democratic party now took its candidate from that State "without any pledges whatever."
After this election Van Buren spent two years in Europe. President Pierce tendered him the position of the American arbitrator upon the British-American claims commission established under the treaty of February 8, 1853, but he declined. During his absence the South secured the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the practical opening to slavery of the new Territories north of the line of 36° 30'. If the settlers of Kansas, which lay wholly on the free side of that compromise line, desired slavery, they were to have it. But even this was not sufficient. The hardy settlers of this frontier, separated though they were by the slave State of Missouri from free soil and free influences, would, it now seemed, pretty certainly favor freedom. The ermine of the Supreme Court had, therefore, to be used to sanctify with the Dred Scott decision the last demand of slavery, inconsistent though it was with the claims of the South from the time when it secured the Missouri Compromise until Calhoun grimly advanced his monstrous propositions. Slavery was to be decreed a constitutional right in all Territories, whose exercise in them Congress was without power to prohibit, and which could not be prevented even by the majority of their settlers until they were admitted as States.
Van Buren came back to America when there was still secret within the judicial breast the momentous decision that the American flag carried human slavery with it to conquered territory as a necessary incident of its stars and stripes, and that Congress could not, if it would, save the land to freedom. Van Buren voted for Buchanan; a vote essentially inconsistent with his Free-soil position, a vote deeply to be regretted. He still thought that free settlers would defeat the intention of the Kansas-Nebraska act, and bring in, as they afterwards did, a free though bleeding Kansas. There was something crude and menacing in this new Republican party, and in its enormous and growing enthusiasm. It was hard to believe that its candidate had been seriously selected for chief magistrate of the United States. Fremont probably seemed to Van Buren a picturesque sentimentalist leading the way to civil war, which, if it were to come, ought, so it seemed to this former senator and minister and president, to be led in by serious and disciplined statesmen. The new party was repulsive to him as a body chiefly of Whigs; old and bitter adversaries whom he distrusted, with hosts of camp-followers smelling the coming spoils. All this a young man might endure, when he saw the clear fact that the Republican convention, ignoring for the time all former differences, had pronounced not a word inconsistent with the Democratic platform of 1840, and had made only the one declaration essential to American freedom and right, that slavery should not go into the Territories. Van Buren was not, however, a young man, or one of the few old men in whom a fiery sense of morality, and an eager and buoyant resolution, are unchilled by thinner and slower blood, and indomitably overcome the conservative influences of age. A bold outcry from him, even now, would have placed him for posterity in one of the few niches set apart to the very greatest Americans. But since 1848 Van Buren had come to seventy-four years.
Invited to the Tammany Hall celebration of Independence Day, he wrote, on June 28, 1856, a letter in behalf of Buchanan. There was no diminution in explicit clearness; but hope was nearly gone; the peril of the Union obscured every other danger; the South was so threatening that patriotism seemed to him to require at the least a surrender to all that had passed; and for the future our best reliance would be upon a fair vote in Kansas between freedom and slavery. He could not come to its meeting, he told Tammany Hall, because of his age. He had left one invitation unanswered; and if he were so to leave another, he might be suspected of a desire to conceal his sentiments. But this letter should be his last, as it was his first, appearance in the canvass. He was glad of the Democratic reunion; for although not always perfectly right, in no other party had there been "such exclusive regard and devotion to the maintenance of human rights and the happiness and welfare of the masses of the people." There was a touch of age in his fond recitals of the long services of that party since, in Jefferson's days, it had its origin with "the root-and-branch friends of the Republican system;" of its support of the war of 1812; of its destruction of the national bank; of its establishment of an independent treasury. But slavery, he admitted, was now the living issue. Upon that he had no regrets for his course. He had always preferred the method of dealing with that institution practiced by the founders of the government. He lamented the recent departure from that method; no one was more sincerely opposed than himself to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. He had heard of it, and condemned it in a foreign land; he had there foreseen the disastrous reopening of the slavery agitation. But the measure was now accomplished; there was no more left than to decide what was the best now to do. The Kansas-Nebraska act had, he said, gradually become less obnoxious to him; though this impression, he admitted, might result from the unanimous acquiescence in it of the party in which he had been reared. Its operation, he trusted, would be beneficial; and he had now come to believe that the feelings and opinions of the free States would be more respected under its provisions than by specific congressional interference. He did not doubt the power of Congress to enable the people of a Territory to exclude slavery. Buchanan's pledge to use the presidential power to restore harmony among the sister States could be redeemed in but one way; and that was, to secure to the actual settlers of the Territory a "full, free, and practical enjoyment" of the rights of suffrage on the slavery question conferred by the act. He praised Buchanan, if not exuberantly, still sufficiently. He must, Van Buren thought, be solicitous for his reputation in the near "evening of his life." He believed that Buchanan would redeem his pledge, and should therefore cheerfully support him. If Buchanan were elected, there were "good grounds for hope" that the Union might be saved. Such was this saddening and despondent letter. It was a defense of a vote which it was rather sorry work that he should have needed to make. But the tramp of armies and the conflagration of American institutions were heard and seen in the sky with terrifying vividness. The letter secured, however, no forgiveness from the angry South. The "Richmond Whig" said: "If there is a man within the limits of the Republic who is cordially abhorred and detested by intelligent and patriotic men of all parties at the South, that man is Martin Van Buren."
Many of the best Americans shared Van Buren's distrust of Fremont and of those who supported Fremont; they shared his love of peace and his fear of that bloodshed, North and South, which seemed the dismal El Dorado to which the "pathfinder's" feet were surely tending. So the majority of the Northern voters thought; for those north of Mason and Dixon's line who divided themselves between Buchanan and Fillmore, the candidate of the "Silver Gray" Whigs, considerably outnumbered the voters for Fremont.
In 1860 Van Buren voted for the union electoral ticket which represented in New York the combined opposition to Lincoln. Every motive which had influenced him in 1856 had now increased even more than his years. The Republican party was not only now come bringing, it seemed, the torch in full flame to light an awful conflagration; but in its second national convention there became obvious upon the tariff question the preponderance of the Whig elements, which made up the larger though not the more earnest or efficient body of its supporters.
After Van Buren's return from Europe in 1855, he lived in dignified and gracious repose. This complete and final escape from the rush about him had often seemed in his busy strenuous years full of delight. But doubtless now in the peaceful pleasures of Lindenwald and in the occasional glimpses of the more crowded social life of New York which was glad to honor him, there were the regrets and slowly dying impatience, the sense of isolation, which must at the best touch with some sadness the later and well-earned and even the best-crowned years. At this time he began writing memoirs of his life and times, which were brought down to the years 1833-1834; but they were never revised by him and have not been published. Out of this work grew a sketch of the early growth of American parties, which was edited by his sons and printed in 1867. Its pages do not exhibit the firm and logical order which was so characteristic of Van Buren's political compositions. It was rather the reminiscence of the political philosophy which had completely governed him. With some repetitions, but in an easy and interesting way, he recalled the far-reaching political differences between Jefferson and Hamilton. In these chapters of his old age are plain the profound and varied influences which had been exercised over him by the great founder of his party, and his unquenchable animosity towards "the money power" from the days of the first secretary of the treasury to its victory of "buffoonery" in 1840. In one chapter, with words rather courtly but still not to be mistaken, he condemns Buchanan for a violation of the principles of Jefferson and Jackson in accepting the Dred Scott decision as a rule of political action; and this the more because its main conclusion was unnecessary to adjudge Dred Scott's rights in that suit, and because its announcement was part of a political scheme. Chief Justice Taney and Buchanan, Van Buren pointed out, though raised to power by the Democratic party, had joined it late in life, "with opinions formed and matured in an antagonist school." Both had come from the Federalist ranks, whose political heresy Van Buren believed to be hopelessly incurable.
At the opening of the civil war Van Buren's animosity to Buchanan's behavior became more and more marked. He strongly sympathized with the uprising of the North; and sustained the early measures of Lincoln's administration. But he was not to see the dreadful but lasting and benign solution of the problem of American slavery. His life ended when the fortunes of the nation were at their darkest; when McClellan's seven days' battle from the Chickahominy to the James was just over, and the North was waiting in terror lest his troops might not return in time to save the capital. For several months he suffered from an asthmatic attack, which finally became a malignant catarrh, causing him much anguish. In the latter days of his sickness his mind wandered; but when sensible and collected he still showed a keen interest in public affairs, expressed his confidence in President Lincoln and General McClellan, and declared his faith that the rebellion would end without lasting damage to the Union.
On July 24, 1862, he died, nearly eighty years old, in the quiet summer air at Lindenwald, the noise of battle far away from his green lawns and clumps of trees. In the ancient Dutch church at Kinderhook the simple funeral was performed; and a great rustic gathering paid the last and best honor of honest and respectful grief to their old friend and neighbor. For his fame had brought its chief honor to this village of his birth, the village to which in happy ending of his earthly career he returned, and where through years of well-ordered thrift, of a gentle and friendly hospitality, and of interesting and not embittered reminiscence, he had been permitted
"To husband out life's taper at the close,
And keep the flame from wasting by repose."
