The American Vice Presidency (15 page)

In December 1831, circumstances conspired to give Calhoun an opportunity to repay Van Buren for his rebuff to Floride. Encouraged by Van Buren, a shake-up of Jackson’s cabinet occurred in the wake of the Peggy Eaton affair, also known now as the “Petticoat War.” As part of the cabinet changes, Jackson nominated Van Buren to be his ambassador to London, and Calhoun was in the chair as presiding officer of the Senate considering confirmation of the appointment.

The process predictably was a stormy one, with all manner of unsettled scores against Van Buren raised by offended senators. Again Calhoun was kept out of the debate by the rules, but he got his chance to express his
feelings when the vote on confirmation ended in a tie—contrived, many believed, to give Calhoun satisfaction. Van Buren had already gone to London, and when the vice president voted against confirmation, the secretary of state was forced to return to Washington. According to Thomas Hart Benton, a U.S. senator from Missouri, Calhoun had gloated, “It will kill him, sir, kill him dead. He will never kick, sir, never kick.” But if he meant the rejection would undermine Van Buren’s chances to replace him as Jackson’s running mate in 1832, he was sorely mistaken. “You have broken a minister,” Benton accurately prophesied, “and elected a Vice President.”
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Jackson regarded Calhoun’s vote as a petty and mean act. “I have no hesitation,” he wrote at the time, to say “that Calhoun is one of the most base hypocritical and principled villains in the United States. His course of secret session, and vote in the case of Mr. Van Buren, has displayed a want of every sense of honor, justice and magnanimity. His vote has dam’d him by all honest men in the Senate, and when laid before the nation, and laid it will be, will not only dam him and his associates, but astonish the American people.”
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There could be no doubt now about Jackson’s intentions, seeing Calhoun’s public actions as a slap not only at Van Buren but also at himself. “The people will resent the insult offered to the Executive and the wound inflicted on our national character,” he wrote to his secretary of state, “and the injury intended to our foreign relations, in your rejection, by placing you in the chair of the very man whose casting vote rejected you.”
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It would be Calhoun out as Jackson’s running mate in 1832 and Van Buren in.

Jackson meanwhile, with Van Buren as his political organizer, remained in solid control of the newly identified Democratic Party. Well into the presidential election year, the Democrats met in Baltimore, where the National Republicans had already nominated Clay for president, and simply confirmed Jackson’s renomination by a host of state party conventions, anointing Van Buren as his handpicked choice for vice president.

With the candidates themselves still not openly campaigning, much of the contest was played out in the partisan newspapers, with political cartoons increasingly coming to the fore. The National Republicans sought to make much of Jackson’s handpicking of his running mate, one cartoon showing Jackson with baby Martin in his arms and another picturing Van Buren handing Jackson a crown as the devil was giving him a scepter.

Jackson, striving to divert the nullification threat in the approaching election, proposed a new, reduced tariff bill designed more to raise revenue than to shelter northern industries, warning manufacturers not to expect voters to “continue permanently to pay high taxes for their benefit.”
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But Calhoun was not placated. He declared he would seek nullification of the bill by South Carolina, and in October the state legislature called for a state convention. It voted overwhelmingly to declare the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 “unauthorized by the Constitution” and accordingly “null, void and no law, nor binding on this state, its officers or citizens.”
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On Election Day, Jackson was easily reelected with Van Buren as his vice president, evidence that the manner of the latter’s nomination by King Andrew didn’t seem to bother the voters. Starting in February 1833 in South Carolina, enforcement of the tariffs would be banned by the nullification edict, as well as any appeals to federal courts, and any federal attempts to interfere would result in the state’s secession from the Union. Robert Hayne resigned from the Senate to become governor, and four days before the end of 1832 Calhoun resigned the vice presidency—the first time anyone had done so—and accepted appointment to Hayne’s Senate seat to lead the nullification fight from the Senate floor.

Jackson quickly responded. Declaring he was ready to “die with the Union,” he dispatched a warship and other vessels to Charleston Harbor, said he was ready to lead a Union army there himself, and threatened to have Calhoun hanged for treason. In a proclamation to the people of South Carolina, he called “the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.”
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The state legislature defiantly labeled Jackson’s views “erroneous and dangerous, leading not only to the establishment of a consolidated government” but also to “the concentration of all powers in the chief executive.”
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Thereupon he asked Congress for a “force bill” authorizing use of the military to achieve compliance. The state, finding itself isolated, sought a compromise through Calhoun and Clay that would reduce the onerous tariff. Two weeks later, the state convention withdrew the nullification ordinance while still insisting the force bill was itself null and void. Jackson was
satisfied and, no doubt, relieved to have Calhoun out of his administration, if only a few weeks earlier than would otherwise have been the case.

For the third time in the country’s brief history, the vice presidency was vacant, but only through the transition period ending on March 4, 1833. Calhoun remained in the Senate, still nurturing dim hopes for a future presidency. In 1843, he resigned with the notion of running for the White House as an independent but soon abandoned the idea and returned to South Carolina to attend to his struggling farm. In 1844, he accepted an appointment as secretary of state under President John Tyler to fill an unexpected vacancy and participated in negotiations on the annexation of Texas until his abbreviated term expired a year later. Again later in 1845, he returned to the U.S. Senate from South Carolina and remained there until his death in 1850, to the end an advocate of withdrawal from the Union.

Calhoun’s vice presidencies under Adams and then Jackson had been marked by basic policy disagreements and often personal animosities that magnified the difficulty of serving effectively in an ultimately powerless position. Still, as a willful and determined man, Calhoun was able to stretch the possibilities of the vice presidency to its limits in ways that might have encouraged other ambitious politicians to seek the much-abused office. Rather than laboring in behalf of the president under whom he served, Calhoun made the vice presidency a base for opposition, mischief, and eventually disloyalty. Yet he remained true to his convictions on positions that broke him both physically and politically in the end.

MARTIN VAN BUREN

OF NEW YORK

A
fter the vice presidential resignation of John C. Calhoun, Martin Van Buren was now poised to fill the void in the election of 1832, with President Andrew Jackson solidly behind him. Unlike previous vice presidents who had acquired the office with at most the sufferance of the presidents under whom they served, Van Buren was the explicit choice of Jackson, who had come to depend heavily on his counsel, particularly regarding political strategy.

Unlike Jackson, Van Buren learned and honed his skills not on the field of arms but on the political battlegrounds of rural New York. He was the son of a farmer–tavern keeper in the Dutch community of Kinderhook, in the Hudson River valley south of Albany, born there in 1782 as the American Revolution approached its formal end through the peace treaty with the English. His was the sixth generation of Van Burens in the Dutch-speaking community, where men married late but then fathered large broods. Martin was one of six siblings ranging from age four to twenty-four and living over the family tavern, and early in life he learned how to hold his own through goodwill and accommodation. Small in stature but from an early age fastidious in his appearance, he eventually acquired the reputation of a dandy, which never left him.
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Young Martin was schooled in the village and had none of the formal education, including writing skills, that many of his contemporaries
acquired. In this strong Federalist area, he became the law apprentice of a local son of a Federalist state senator, Peter Silvester. Martin’s father, Abraham, however, was an ardent Jeffersonian, whose tavern became a gathering place for prominent Republicans.

Resisting the Federalist views of the Silvester clan, Van Buren eventually became friendly with the Van Ness family, Kinderhook Republican leaders. Not yet twenty, he was a delegate to the Republican Party caucus in Troy and helped one of them, John Peter Van Ness, win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Within a year he was able to leave Kinderhook for the first time for New York City, where he was given a job in the law office of another Van Ness kin, William.

William Van Ness had influential Republican connections, one of his eventual claims to fame being Burr’s second in his fateful duel with Hamilton, and he provided young Van Buren with entry into the turbulent Republican world of the city. After gaining admission to the bar, Van Buren returned to Kinderhook in 1803 and joined a half brother, James Van Alen, the town clerk, as his law partner. But the next year, when the Van Nesses pleaded with their protégé to back Burr for governor, Martin stuck with the regular Republican organization candidate Morgan Lewis. He chose party loyalty over friendship and gratitude, an early evidence of his commitment to party solidarity.
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He made his living as a lawyer, without the experiences of military service or foreign travel, but politics became more than his avocation.

Soon after that election, William Van Ness was indicted as an accessory to murder for his role in Burr’s duel with Hamilton. Van Buren defended his old benefactor in court and won his release. At age twenty-four Van Buren was appointed surrogate in his home county, Columbia, and four years later, now married to Hannah Hoes, a distant relative, was elected to the state Senate. He strongly supported the War of 1812 against Federalist opposition and later broke with DeWitt Clinton over the mayor’s pursuit of Federalist backing in his failed 1812 bid for the presidency.
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In 1815, Van Buren became state attorney general and in Albany soon emerged as the leader of the Republican “Bucktail” faction, which revised the New York Constitution and ended the Clinton hold on the party. He then created the powerful Albany Regency, which long thereafter maintained power through strict party discipline, equitable award of patronage, and the
organization of local clubs around the state. In 1818, Van Buren’s wife died of tuberculosis, leaving him with five sons, and he never married again.

In 1821, Van Buren was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he similarly organized the large New York congressional delegation. Looking beyond his New York base, he helped elect Philip Barbour of Virginia as Speaker of the House, replacing John Taylor of New York, a Clinton man, and in the process signaled his interest in restoring the North-South alliance of the early years of the Virginia dynasty.

As a gregarious and fashionably dressed widower new to Washington, New York’s “Little Magician” joined the social whirl with great success. He acquired a reputation as both a pursuer and a target of attractive young women, including a granddaughter of Jefferson, meanwhile broadening his contacts with fellow congressmen of influence from other sections of the country. A new southern friend was Calhoun, then the secretary of war, who would eventually play a leading role with Van Buren in Andrew Jackson’s political climb, as noted previously.

While maintaining the leadership of the Albany Regency back home, Van Buren also focused on national issues in his plan to build a national party. As a U.S. senator he took care to adopt cautious positions on the tariff, internal improvements, banking, and slavery, thus accommodating his plans to revive the Old Republican North-South alliance.

Still the loyal party man, Van Buren supported William Crawford as the winner of the Republican congressional caucus for the presidency in 1824, even after the Georgian’s serious illness had compromised his chances as a serious contender. Van Buren believed Crawford could still win and would be the most receptive to the Old Republican alliance Van Buren hoped to reestablish.
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He warned Regency members of the high stakes beyond the election if New York didn’t go for Crawford. What he really was after was extending the power of the Regency nationwide through his revived party structure. Crawford was nominated in a low turnout of the Republican congressional caucus, but Van Buren failed in the end to deliver the New York electors for him, and Crawford was finished.