CHAPTER 1
The season for animated debate is rapidly passing by, our politicians possessing a more fervid and glowing heat in the winter than in the summer. This would lead one to conclude that the fire which blazed within them was not from heaven.
—JOHN TYLER
Van Buren ~ Buchanan ~ Tyler
As far as exiles go, the Court of St. James’s would not be without its charms.
A year and four months after his toast to compromise, Martin Van Buren was on a ship bound for England, the familiar scenes of home yielding to the dark and choppy waters of the North Atlantic. Van Buren believed his life’s ambition to the presidency faded along with his view of the coast.
Nearly two decades earlier Van Buren had been aboard a ship when he learned of his first great political victory. He and his legal colleagues were sailing down the Hudson to attend court in New York City. At one of the stops came the news that he had become the youngest member of the New York Senate—by 200 votes out of 30,000 cast.
Van Buren was born in upstate New York in 1782, after the decisive siege of Yorktown but before the Treaty of Paris recognized American independence, growing up with three children by his mother’s previous marriage and six siblings from his parents’ union, along with six slaves his mother had inherited. His father was a farmer who operated a tavern on his property. For Van Buren, working in a barroom was an appropriate apprenticeship for politics. No doubt he could remember debates over the proposed Constitution of 1787, which bitterly divided the state of New York as well as his own Columbia County. As he grew older, he remembered he “had been a zealous partisan, supporting with all my power the administrations of Jefferson and Madison.”
Van Buren began his legal training at age fourteen, doing menial work in his employer’s office to earn his place. The archaic method of recording property titles was a persistent source of litigation, and after a time learning his trade in New York City, Van Buren returned home to Kinderhook and made a name for himself defending small landholders.
The New York Senate was scene to Van Buren’s first attempts at a “science of politics” to manage competing ideological and ethnic factions. Working with allies, he helped create a statewide network of political leaders and newspapers, slating candidates for office and managing the affairs of their party, a group that would become known as “The Albany Regency,” the first true statewide political machine. His tremendous political skill gave rise to nicknames such as “The Little Magician,” a reference to his diminutive height, or the “Red Fox of Kinderhook,” a nod to his hair color in younger days. A strong supporter of the War of 1812, Van Buren was appointed attorney general three years later (a position he held concurrently with his state senate seat). At age thirty-eight, with the Regency ensconced in power, the New York legislature appointed Van Buren a member of the US Senate.
It was the “Era of Good Feelings,” with President James Monroe in his second term. Successor to Jefferson and Madison, completing the most durable dynasty in presidential history, Monroe’s presidency was believed by some to make party politics a relic of the past. Van Buren knew better. Though now on a bigger stage with more complex factions, Van Buren tried to re-create the coalition building that had led him to the top of New York politics.
As the 1824 presidential election approached, Van Buren reached out to the leaders of emerging political organizations throughout the country, from New Hampshire to Georgia, attempting to unite the friends of limited government against supporters of a more active federal role, led by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. General Andrew Jackson ultimately won a majority of the popular vote and the lion’s share of the Electoral College, but fell short of a majority there, casting the race to the House of Representatives where he was defeated. Adams’s victory did not deter Van Buren’s efforts. Jackson had not been his first choice for president, and perhaps was not now, but promising the greatest chance of electoral success, Van Buren offered him an early endorsement in 1826.
As 1827 began, Van Buren sat down to write a letter to Thomas Ritchie, a powerful newspaper editor and political boss in Richmond, Virginia. In it he proposed an alliance between the “planters of the south and the plain republicans of the north.” Together with “General Jackson’s personal popularity,” he believed they could unseat Adams. Van Buren, who had married a childhood acquaintance, may have believed that a romantic marriage was strengthened by similitude. But he knew that a durable political marriage relied on disparate groups uniting. Later that year the New Yorker traveled south, whipping up support for Jackson and assisting in the building of new party operations.
Sparing no effort to win the presidential election, Van Buren agreed to run as the Jacksonian candidate for governor of New York, where his friends believed that his personal popularity would boost the entire ticket. This time Jackson would win the state, by a margin of 8,000 votes out of 270,000 cast, on his way to winning a landslide across the country. From these efforts and the presidential victory they produced would emerge the Democratic Party, with Jackson generally considered its first chief executive.
Van Buren had not sought out the governorship, but a reprieve would not be long in coming. Jackson rewarded him with the first place in his administration as secretary of state. The previous four presidents had all held the preeminent position in the cabinet. Why would Van Buren, with his great political skill, fail to reach the summit as they had? And so it must have been with great surprise that he found himself out of the cabinet and on a ship bound for England a little more than two years later.
Jackson’s presidency, commenced with such promise, had a congenital defect. Van Buren would remember the scandal “kept alive by feelings of the bitterest character” for two years, “a plague to social intercourse, destructive in many instances of private friendship, deranging public business . . . disparaging the character of the government.”
Secretary of War John Henry Eaton, a dear friend of Jackson from Tennessee, had married Margaret O’Neill Timberlake shortly after the death of her husband, and in the process scandalized certain quarters of Washington. Floride Calhoun, wife of Vice President John C. Calhoun, led the other cabinet wives in ostracizing the Eatons. The Eaton Affair paralyzed the cabinet, divided the city, and caused the president “daily anguish.”
Van Buren, son of a country tavern keeper, had no use for the protocols so harshly applied to the young couple. As a widower he had no worry of a wife to drag him into the wrong side of the quarrel. His support for the Eatons solidified his relationship with the president, who in turn became increasingly estranged from Calhoun. Within the cabinet, aside from Eaton himself, only the postmaster general joined Van Buren in supporting Margaret.
This seemingly silly concern implicated questions of great magnitude, perhaps none more so than the question of who would be Jackson’s successor. Congressman James Buchanan of Pennsylvania noted, “Disguise it as we may, the friends of Van Buren and those of Calhoun are becoming very jealous of each other.” John Quincy Adams, the former president now serving in the House of Representatives, wrote, “It is the prevailing opinion . . . that Mr. Van Buren is about to scale the Presidency of the United States by mounting upon the shoulders of Mrs. Eaton.”
The 1829 social season that preceded the meeting of Congress brought these hostilities to the fore. Van Buren, determined to integrate the Eatons into Washington social life, held an event of his own, but none of the other cabinet wives attended. Van Buren and Jackson turned to the diplomatic corps for support, ensuring the Eatons were invited to balls given by the British and Russian ministers. When the wife of the minister from the Netherlands tried to exclude the Eatons from a ball, Van Buren attempted to persuade her in Dutch, his first language, while Jackson threatened to expel her husband from the country, differing approaches emblematic of their varying temperaments.
By the end of his first year in office, Jackson was permanently estranged from Calhoun and had settled on Van Buren as his successor. Encouraged to write a letter that could be used in case of his death, Jackson penned a political last will and testament and praised Van Buren in the strongest terms. The bequest referred to him as “well qualified to fill the highest office in the gift of the people, who in him will find a true friend and safe depository of their rights and liberty. I wish I could say as much for Mr. Calhoun.”
In the summer of 1831, on one of their regular horseback rides, Van Buren mustered the courage to tell Jackson of the decision he had already made privately.
“General, there is but one thing that can give you peace.”
“What is that, Sir?”
“My resignation.” It would not be enough to dismiss the Calhoun faction; doing so would make Jackson as well as Van Buren an object of wrath for the disappointed party. They would all have to go. And he would be the first to fall on his sword.
“Never, Sir! Even you know little of Andrew Jackson if you suppose him capable of consenting to such humiliation of his friend by his enemies.”
Van Buren spent four hours trying to convince him, interrupted only occasionally by questions from the president. It was in his best interests to have a harmonious cabinet, Van Buren argued, something he would not achieve with the current composition. What had he planned for the future? Jackson asked. When Van Buren suggested returning to practice law, Jackson refused to countenance it. Perhaps, Jackson offered, the prestigious post of minister to England would allow him a face-saving departure.
Taking his hand, Jackson said that he had much to think about and asked him to come to the White House in the morning. There he found a careworn president who had not slept since their conversation. Van Buren noticed Jackson yielding “to the obvious force of the truth as I spread it before him.”
Van Buren and Eaton resigned from the cabinet. Jackson soon dismissed the Calhounites, who had failed to follow in kind. The minister to Great Britain was recalled to create an opening for Van Buren, who was appointed to the post in August. He would keep it subject to the consent of the Senate, which heretofore had been customarily given.
Arriving in September, Van Buren went quickly to work, the country lawyer gliding easily through the gilded halls of British government. On the day of the king’s first formal reception of the season, Van Buren felt too ill to attend. He asked for his mail to be brought to his bedside, where at once he noted its unusual volume. He first opened the letter of a friend, a congressman from New York, which contained the shocking news. “I most sincerely congratulate you on your rejection by the Senate.” Van Buren’s enemies had finally gone too far, frontally challenging the popular President Jackson. The friend predicted that Van Buren would now be selected vice president “in spite of yourself.” Encouraging him to hasten home, he wrote, “we have no triumphal arches as in ancient Rome, but we’ll give you as warm a reception as ever a conqueror had.”
Though stung and embarrassed by this rebuke, Van Buren reconsidered and attended the king’s levee rather than staying in bed. At the palace, Lord Palmerston, foreign affairs secretary, conveyed the king’s condolences, remarking that “no class of her [England’s] public men were exempted from experiencing the excesses of party spirit.”
Van Buren’s rejection had come after two days of fiery debate. Senators Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Henry Clay of Kentucky arranged for the balloting to end in a tie, thus handing the knife to Vice President Calhoun. “It will kill him sir,” Calhoun jeered triumphantly, “kill him dead. He will never kick, sir, never kick.” Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri overheard him and disagreed. “You have broken a minister,” he predicted, “and elected a Vice President.”
Senator John Tyler of Virginia agreed with Benton. “Jackson is invincible; Van Buren is elevated by the silly thing of rejecting him; Calhoun is greatly injured.” So it was.
The first Democratic National Convention would meet in May 1832 to re-nominate Jackson and select his running mate. With Van Buren at a safe, transatlantic distance, the question of the vice presidency would in reality be about whether to sustain Jackson. In March Van Buren wrote Senator William Marcy, his old ally in the Albany Regency, that if “my elevation to the Vice Presidency [is] the most effectual mode of testifying to the world their sentiments with respect to the act of the President and the vote of the Senate, I can see no justifiable ground for declining to yield to their wishes.”
Jackson was convincingly re-elected over Henry Clay with his chosen successor as his running mate. But he would not be sworn in for a second term before seeing off the greatest crisis to face the Union. On November 24, 1832, an ordinance was unanimously carried by a convention of the most prominent citizens of South Carolina. The tariff of 1828 and the 1832 amendments were declared “null, void, and no law, nor binding upon this state, its officers or citizens,” and after February 1, 1833, the state would no longer pay federal duties. Nullification, begun in whispers, persisting in rhetoric, was now a reality. But more dangerous still was the fifth section of the ordinance, which held that if the federal government attempted to enforce the tariff, South Carolina would withdraw from the Union, severing all political connections and establishing an independent nation. South Carolina lawmakers immediately passed legislation adopting the ordinance. The governor was empowered to accept volunteer soldiers. Calhoun resigned the vice presidency and returned to Washington as a senator to press the case for nullification.
The nullifiers would meet formidable opposition. In the words of one biographer, “If ever a man was resolved to accomplish a purpose, General Jackson was resolved on this occasion to preserve intact the authority with which he had been entrusted.” Jackson ordered the collector of the Port of Charleston to “resort to all means provided by the laws.” If necessary, he was to seize and even sell cargo to satisfy the duty.
As the standoff began, General Sam Dale of Mississippi, who had served under Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, arrived in Washington on other business. Sent for by his old friend, Dale arrived to find Jackson on the lawn of the White House, from where the president conducted him to a reception room with Senator Benton and several others. They discussed the only subject on anybody’s mind. “General Dale,” Jackson said, “if this thing goes on, our country will be like a bag of meal with both ends open. Pick it up in the middle or endwise, and it will run out. I must tie the bag and save the country.” When everyone left, Jackson asked his old comrade to remain. He instructed his servants to bring up whisky and turn away visitors. They talked briefly of their time together in the War of 1812. “Sam, you have been true to your country,” Jackson said, “but you have made one mistake in life. You are now old and solitary, and without a bosom friend or family to comfort you. God called mine away. But all I have achieved—fame, power, every thing—would I exchange if she could be restored to me for a moment.” Jackson “trembled with emotion, and for some time covered his face with his hands, and in tears dropped on his knee.” He said, “they are trying me here; you will witness it; but, by the God of heaven, I will uphold the laws.”
Dale expressed his hope that all would go right.
“They shall go right, sir,” Jackson said passionately, smashing his pipe to splinters on the table.
Jackson hurriedly prepared an address to the upcoming session of Congress, writing so quickly that he was forced to spread out the pages in order for them to dry. Jackson replaced the Charleston garrison with more reliable troops, put the War and Navy Departments on notice, and dispatched a spy to learn if federal officers in the Palmetto State had gone over to the nullifiers.
On December 12, Jackson issued the proclamation that had so rapidly poured from his head to the page. “I consider the power to annul a law of the United States assumed by one state incompatible with the existence of the Union, inconsistent with every principle on which the Constitution was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed. No state or states has a right to secede,” he said. “The Union must be preserved without blood if possible, but it must be preserved at all hazards and at any price.” The government of South Carolina responded with hostile remonstrances of their own, showing no signs of backing down. On January 16, the president asked Congress for authorization to use force against South Carolina.
Senator John Tyler now faced a question that not only carried the possible fate of the country, but one with the potential to destroy his political future. Tyler, though only forty-three, was well into a very full career. A graduate of William and Mary and a lawyer by training, he had served ten years in the General Assembly of Virginia; five years in the US House, where he had voted against the Missouri Compromise; governor; and for the past nine years a member of the Senate. Tyler was of the first families of Virginia, his father a classmate of Thomas Jefferson who had served with Madison and Monroe in the state’s legislature before pre-dating his son as governor.
In keeping with his upbringing, Tyler had a dignified bearing. “Half the success in life depends on manners,” he once told his son, “and the first and highest conquest is for him to obtain a mastery over his passions.” Tyler looked the part: thin and over six feet tall, blue eyes, “silky brown” hair, and an angular nose befitting his aristocratic roots. While riding in a carriage on the road to Washington, a passenger complained that he could smell the city before it came into view. “Why, sir,” Tyler responded, “if you can smell Washington with your nose, my nose must be there already.”
Tyler had a history of independence from the popular Jackson that had cast doubt on his re-election even before the current crisis. The Virginia legislature had originally scheduled the Senate election for January 30,1832. Now it was postponed for two weeks to force Tyler to show his hand on the president’s request to use the military in South Carolina.
Tyler believed the nullifiers had made a mistake. But he did not condone coercing them by force and determined to lose his seat in opposition if necessary. On February 6, Tyler spoke out against “An act further to provide for the collection of duties on imports,” known popularly and to its opponents as the “Force Bill.” His discourse on the Senate floor was a revealing look at his views on the United States and the proper relationship between federal and state governments. “If I could hesitate as to my course, now that the storm is raging, the battlements rocking, and our institutions trembling to their foundations, I should be derelict to my highest duty, and recreant to the great trust confided in me.
“Let us learn to admire the beautiful system under which we live, and not seek to convert it into what it is not. Everything, Mr. President, is running into nationality. You cannot walk along the streets without seeing the word on almost every sign—national hotel, national boot-black, national blacksmith, national oyster-house.” Here he was interrupted by a senator who added “The newspapers” to the list. “I let them alone,” Tyler explained. “No man gets anything by intermeddling with them.” Continuing, he said, “The government was created by the states, is amenable to the states, is preserved by the states, and may be destroyed by the states. I owe no responsibility, politically speaking, elsewhere than to my state.
“To arm him [Jackson] with military power is to give him authority to crush South Carolina, should she adopt secession. When the question comes up (I trust it never will), should the decision be formally pronounced against the right of secession, it would come to be a subject worthy of all reflection, whether the military arm should be exerted, or other measures of a milder nature, but equally efficacious, be resorted to.
“I would that I but moral influence enough to save my country in this hour of peril . . . I stand here manacled in a minority, whose efforts can avail but little. You, who are the majority, have the destinies of the country in your hands. If war shall grow out of this measure, you are alone responsible.”
Jackson’s policy of coercion cost him support in Virginia. Tyler’s opposition dramatically increased his standing among the people. The Virginia Senate election, delayed to undermine Tyler, resulted in his reappointment by a wide margin. When the Force Bill came to a vote, Calhoun led a walkout of southern senators. Tyler held his ground and registered the lone dissent.
By this time Tyler and Henry Clay had already been conferring on a compromise. Budget surpluses as well as southern agitation compelled a reduction in the tariff. But northern manufacturers needed time to prepare for the increased competition of less expensive foreign goods. “Time,” Tyler told Clay, “is of little importance to us.” Tyler believed the real issue for southerners was crafting a tariff solely to raise revenue and not for protection. Tyler agreed to sound out the South about whether this tack would resolve the crisis. Clay’s proposal kept the current rates in place until July 1, 1842, followed by a substantial reduction to 20 percent, and articulated the principle that the tariff existed simply to fund the government. When it finally passed the Senate, Tyler and Clay shook hands on the floor, congratulating one another.
Into this maelstrom of tariffs, secession, and nullification, Martin Van Buren made his triumphal return to office. He later wrote, “It is difficult to imagine a more critical condition than that in which I found the country involved at the moment of my arrival in Washington on the 26th of February, 1833.” President Jackson picked him up in his own carriage and brought him to the gates of the Capitol. He then entered the Senate where he would preside as vice president, over friends and enemies alike.
On March 2, as his first term drew to a close, Jackson signed both the Force Bill and the Compromise Tariff. South Carolina responded by repealing the offensive ordinance. On the day he learned of his victory, the old general wrote his minister to Russia, James Buchanan. “I met nullification at its threshold. My proclamation was well timed, as it at once opened the eyes of the people to the wicked designs of the nullifiers, whose real motives had too long remained concealed.
“Although the tariff was made the ostensible object, a separation of the confederacy was the real purpose of its originators and supporters.” The reaction, Jackson believed, all throughout the country, was “that it is not probable that we shall be troubled with them again shortly.”
Buchanan had passed a cold winter in St. Petersburg, anxious for updates that were in short supply. He replied to the president, “I sincerely rejoice that our domestic differences seem almost to have ended. Independently of their fatal influence at home, they had greatly injured the character of the country abroad . . . God grant that the restless spirits which have kindled the flame in South Carolina may neither be willing nor able to promote disunion by rendering the Southern States generally disaffected towards the best of governments.”