The American Vice Presidency (16 page)

As already noted, the 1824 election was now in Clay’s hands, and in giving his electors to John Quincy Adams and winding up as Adams’s secretary of state, the alleged infamous “corrupt bargain” was struck. The outcome was a colossal blunder for Van Buren, the supposed political genius. Why
he had stuck with the stricken Crawford when he could have switched to either Jackson or Clay was puzzling. In his later autobiography, he wrote, “I left Albany for Washington as completely broken down a politician as my bitterest enemies could desire.”
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Biographer Donald B. Cole later speculated that Van Buren’s “determination to place national goals ahead of state goals, and to create a political party based upon Old Republican principles and an alliance of New York and Virginia, North and South, was the reason.” Cole suggested that Van Buren needed an acceptable Old Republican who represented the South, and only Crawford of the other candidates filled the bill. “In trying to revive the old contest throughout the United States,” Cole concluded, “he had weakened his hold on New York.”
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In the wake of the failure to deny New York’s electors to Adams, Van Buren worked to maintain his influence in the Albany Regency. Although he was dismayed at the election of Adams and how it was achieved, he largely held his tongue for some time. But eventually some of Adams’s domestic plans and particularly his involvement in the Panama conference of South and Central American nations drove Van Buren to seek an alliance with Calhoun, who shared Van Buren’s opposition to Adams’s plans to send a delegation to the conference. They found common ground in what was a larger mutual undertaking—replacing Adams in the White House with Jackson. Applying his Regency organizational skills to that end, Van Buren made a substantial start on building what came to be called the Jacksonian Democracy in the pattern of the Old Republicanism of Jefferson.

Van Buren had to walk a tightrope in accommodating both the North and the South. While supportive of DeWitt Clinton’s successful Erie Canal, he had to bear in mind the Old Republican opposition to federally planned and financed internal improvements. In reaching out to the South, he had to strike a centrist course in light of strong protectionist support for northern manufacture and bitter southern opposition to high tariffs on the region’s agricultural livelihood. And regarding slavery, he opposed it in harmony with fellow northerners while placating southerners by defending its continuation where it already existed.

Eventually Van Buren became Jackson’s chief political strategist and adviser. But in time he split with Vice President Calhoun over the South Carolinian’s threat to nullify the Tariff of Abominations, seen in the South
as throttling the region’s agriculture. Van Buren was sympathetic both with the southern farmers, who hated the tariff, and the northern manufacturers, who desired it, and with the Jeffersonian defense of states’ rights. At the same time, he shared Jackson’s opposition to nullification, insisting that the Union had to be preserved at all costs. As for Calhoun, it was clear by now that he would not be Adams’s running mate in 1828 and hoped Jackson would offer him a second vice presidential term in the new administration the old general anticipated would be his.

Before Van Buren could concentrate on his ambitious national party building, he had to focus on reelection to the Senate. He mended fences with the Albany Regency and with DeWitt Clinton, just reelected governor, and won easily. Now both Calhoun and Clinton had their eyes on the second federal office. In January 1928, the New York legislature nominated Jackson for president and dodged controversy by nominating no one for vice president. Two weeks later, DeWitt Clinton dropped dead, and the path seemed clear for Calhoun.

Just as significant for Van Buren, the valued patronage plums in New York now fell under his direction as he grew in importance in Jackson’s eyes and attentions. Jackson himself was seen increasingly by the Little Magician as a man in the Old Republican mold of Jefferson. He was not a Revolutionary War hero to be sure, but a hero of the next generation in the second war against the British, who would manifest immense personal appeal along with advancing the cause of party that Van Buren so ardently pursued.

For all that, Clinton’s death left a gaping vacuum in the political leadership of New York State. The lieutenant governor who succeeded him, Nathaniel Pitcher, was a minor political figure, and the Regency decided he would not be strong enough to hold the seat in the next election. He was persuaded to step aside after serving a few months as acting governor, and the organization turned to Van Buren to seek the governorship, even though he just been reelected to the U.S. Senate, with high aspirations of continuing to play a major role in Jackson’s second term. But he agreed to run for governor and was elected in January 1829. Barely a month later, however, President Jackson asked Van Buren to return to Washington as secretary of state in his new administration.

The new governor of New York was once again confronted with the
choice of whether to restore and maintain what he had built there or go on to pursue his ambitions for a national party. He realized, however, that as secretary of state, a presidential candidacy of his own after Jackson’s retirement would become a possibility. He finally agreed to return to Washington, turning over the governorship to his lieutenant governor.

As the ranking member of the Jackson cabinet, Van Buren had Jackson’s strong confidence but was by no means running things. Jackson asserted his own will in the other cabinet appointments, and inevitably an internal power struggle developed between the two earlier allies, Van Buren and Calhoun, now vice president. As secretary of state, Van Buren proved to be surprisingly effective, considering his sparse foreign policy experience. Trade in the West Indies was cleared along with the opening of American ports to the British, and the settlement of twenty-five million francs in French debts in return for a reduction in tariffs on imported wine was also achieved. Also, during this time, the Peggy Eaton scandal was gripping Washington. As noted earlier, much of Van Buren’s diplomacy was devoted to smoothing ruptured feelings by providing social engagements for her among the diplomatic corps, to the gratitude of her friend Jackson.

Regarding Calhoun, Van Buren took on the role of mediator with Jackson in their headlong clash over nullification, coaching the president on his famous dinner toast at the Jefferson birthday celebration, “The Union: It must be preserved,” and offering his own toast for “mutual forbearance and reciprocal concessions.”
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That fall, with Van Buren as Jackson’s secretary of state, the president suddenly proposed a plan to him designed explicitly to make him his successor in the White House. Aging and tiring, Jackson had been saying he would serve only a single term. But now he informed Van Buren that he had decided to run again after all in 1832, with Van Buren as his running mate. Then, he told Van Buren privately, after their election and inauguration, he would resign the presidency, elevating his friend to the first office. Van Buren rejected the scheme,
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perhaps as too transparent and likely to undermine the credibility of such a presidency from the start.

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

Jackson followed through on the Van Buren strategy, breaking up his cabinet and sending the Little Magician to London, writing him that he hoped to retire from the presidency soon to “open the door” for a successor, adding knowingly that Van Buren would “understand” him. Shortly afterward came another letter in the same vein, saying Jackson wanted to arrange “the selection of a vice president” to his satisfaction, enabling him to retire “to the peaceful shades of the Hermitage,” his mansion in Tennessee.
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In the meantime, however, Van Buren was basking in the luxury of being an ambassador, writing so glowingly to Jackson about his new circumstance that the president began to wonder whether his preferred successor had changed his mind. But when Louis McLane, who had become Jackson’s treasury secretary in the cabinet shake-up, began to indicate vice presidential ambitions of his own, Van Buren dropped the coyness. In response to a suggestion that he return to the Senate rather than seek the second office, he wrote Jackson that he had a “strong repugnance” to the idea and was ready to be his vice presidential running mate. He would remain abroad to avoid the approaching Democratic convention, leaving his “friends” to decide his future.
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Reports of other Jackson supporters considering a challenge to Van Buren soon faded. At the convention in Baltimore in May, Jackson was renominated by acclamation, and the only real business was endorsing his choice of running mate. To assure a unified party, the convention adopted a rule requiring a two-thirds vote for nomination of both president and vice president, and Van Buren cleared the hurdle with 260 of the 326 votes cast.
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On Van Buren’s return in early July, he went to the White House and was shocked by Jackson’s emaciated appearance and concerned by his
distress. Congress had just passed a bill pushed by Clay to recharter the Bank of the United States. The president greeted him with “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me, but I will kill it!”
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Whereupon Jackson vetoed the bill, only to be confronted a few days later with passage of a new tariff bill, both issues on which Van Buren would have to take positions as the campaign unfolded.

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

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

Jackson assured Van Buren that his veto of the bank bill would turn out to be a political masterstroke. “The veto works well,” he enthused. “Instead of crushing me as was expected and intended, it will crush the Bank.” Van Buren agreed: “The veto is popular beyond my most sanguine expectations.”
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On this and other issues, he sought not so much to drive Jackson’s decision making as to be a cautionary voice of moderation, as he continued to maintain his goal of cementing the North-South alliance as the bedrock of the Jacksonian Democratic Party. On the whole nullification matter, Van Buren preached understanding of the South’s position on states’ rights and slavery without succumbing to or apologizing for it. When Jackson issued a proclamation condemning nullification as “incompatible with the existence of the Union,” he subsequently wrote Van Buren that he intended to charge nullifiers with “acts of treason,” calling on Congress for “the power to call upon volunteers” to quash “this wicked faction in its bud.”
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Van Buren
counseled Jackson to cool off and, in dealing with Virginia, to allow for “honest differences of opinion.” Typically, he wrote, “You will say, I am on my old track—caution—caution.” Jackson continued to talk tough, while promising Van Buren that he would act with “forbearance.”
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The Democratic ticket of Jackson and Van Buren—wedding the old Jeffersonian planters of the South and “the plain Republicans” of the North—was easily elected. Once sworn in as vice president, Van Buren as presiding officer of the Senate had to contend with a torrent of abuse against Jackson, particularly from the old foe Clay, over killing the second national bank and the rate of transferred deposits to state banks. In one such tirade, Clay compared Jackson to the “the worst of the Roman emperors” and demanded that Van Buren tell the president of the “tears of helpless widows … and of unclad and unfed orphans” who had suffered at Jackson’s hands.

Van Buren sat calmly through the abuse, but when it was over he rose from his chair and walked threateningly over to Clay on the Senate floor. As other senators stared in anticipation of a brawl, Van Buren politely asked of Clay, “Mr. Senator, allow me to be indebted to you for another pinch of your aromatic Maccoboy.” He then took the snuff, inhaled it, and returned to his chair, deflating Clay.
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As president of the Senate, Van Buren also had to find accommodating ground on the slavery issue. As a northerner who favored emancipation but was cool to abolitionists, he believed questions related to the issue should be left to the states. Required to break a tie vote on a Calhoun resolution authorizing local postal officials to confiscate abolitionist mailings barred by state law, he cast his ballot with the South—apparently a nod to the preservation of his cherished North-South party alliance.
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