Martin Van Buren

by Ted Widmer

  In every domain of the intellect, a restless curiosity seized Americans, eager to build new frontiers wherever they could, and then to extend them again. The patent office groaned with the weight of new applications from a nation of tinkerers. Steamboats began to cross the Atlantic in April 1838, shrinking the distance between London and New York to a mere fortnight. The invention of the camera in France quickly led to the earliest American photographs, including, in 1840, the first ever taken of the moon (an early sign of America’s proprietary interest). It is surprising that no one in France or England had thought to point a camera upward before, but Americans were always doing unusual things.

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  One of the more exciting examples of America’s intellectual expansionism was a remarkable scientific expedition that set out in the summer of 1838 from Norfolk, Virginia, with six vessels and 346 men. The United States Exploring Expedition, or U.S. Ex. Ex., was the largest effort that had ever been mounted by the American government to advance human knowledge, and a worthy ancestor to the NASA missions of the 1960s. Its mission, no less daunting at the time, was the exploration of the little-known Southern Hemisphere and the remote reaches of the Pacific Ocean. The mission had received its original impetus from John Quincy Adams, but Van Buren took strong personal interest in it and gave much-needed encouragement to its leader, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, when the navy seemed to take a dim view of the project. Despite considerable adversity, the U.S. Ex. Ex. would make history in a number of ways: the first oceangoing voyage of discovery by the U.S. government, the last all-sail naval squadron to circumnavigate the world, and a crucial extension of American force into Pacific regions that might as well have been extraterrestrial for their distance from the Yankee republic. All in all, before returning in 1842, the expedition logged 87,000 miles, mapped 800 miles of Oregon territory, and explored 1,500 miles of Antarctic coastline. Its Pacific charts were still being used a century later, in World War II.

  Van Buren also encountered the world in other, less pleasant ways. Tensions with Great Britain had not entirely abated since his arrival on the political stage during the War of 1812, and during his presidency they flared up again along the long, poorly defined northern frontier. In the fall of 1837, a Canadian rebellion against Great Britain erupted just over the New York border, and drew support from many New Yorkers eager to renew the quarrel against their familiar enemy. In response to provocations, the British sent a militia to the American side of the Niagara River to board a vessel, the Caroline, which had been running supplies to the rebels. One American was killed, and rumors were soon circulating that exaggerated the attack. George Templeton Strong wrote in his diary, “It’s infamous—forty unarmed American citizens butchered in cold blood, while sleeping, by a party of British assassins, and living and dead sent together over Niagara.”

  Van Buren was in a tight spot because what there was of the U.S. Army was already engaged putting down the Seminoles in Florida, but he asked the Northern state governors to help him cool tensions and to strictly enforce neutrality. While Van Buren protested the Caroline affair to the British ambassador, he was working behind the scenes to keep the conflict from growing larger. He was helped by his Regency friend Governor William Marcy, and by General Winfield Scott, who went to the border region and soon got things under control.

  A year later, a very similar problem arose in a different location. The northeast border between Maine and Canada had never been settled properly, and the governor of Maine enraged the lieutenant governor of New Brunswick when he sent an expedition into the St. John River valley to clear out Canadian “trespassers.” Soon militias were threatening one another on both sides of the border, and once again Van Buren sent Winfield Scott to calm things down. After some tense discussions in Washington, the American and British governments agreed to remove all troops from the area.

  Both of these crises proved to be triumphs for Van Buren’s cautious diplomacy, and the fact that he had been minister to the Court of Saint James certainly helped him to see the situation clearly. Similarly, Van Buren’s decision to postpone the annexation of Texas was seen by many as a brave and prudent decision that flew in the face of his perceived allegiance to the Slave Power, but it cost him support from the volatile Southwesterners who were suspicious of Van Buren to begin with, including Andrew Jackson. All in all, Van Buren had an impressive foreign policy record during his tenure and showed more backbone than his accusers were inclined to admit.1

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  Van Buren also tried a few courageous measures on the home front. As the campaign year 1840 dawned, he realized that he had to do something to relieve conditions for the urban poor who were hit hardest by the Panic. It was too early in American history for any president—and especially a Jeffersonian—to offer direct relief. But on March 31, 1840, Van Buren issued an executive order creating a ten-hour day for federal workers, a dramatic step forward at a time when many employees worked from sunrise to sunset. Though Van Buren did not take particular credit for the order at the time or later, it set an important precedent and showed skeptics that labor was more than animal strength, that people who worked deserved to be noticed, and that politics was about more than who could purchase influence. The Democratic platform that year had a plank that affirmed, in simple language, the Declaration of Independence, and thereby encouraged poor people from all races. The Slave Power would delete it in 1844, and it would not reappear until long after the Civil War.

  But despite these breakthroughs, Van Buren had a serious image problem. To some extent, it was the same petty jealousy that had dogged his entire career. More than any president to date, he was criticized for the way he had maneuvered his way into the White House, and that distrust was exacerbated by the Panic of 1837 and the growing sectional rift. The more he tried to placate the North and South, the more he was perceived as an agent of one against the other. The more the economy foundered, the more easily everything wrong with modernity could be laid at his feet. If nothing else, he was an easily lampoonable president; his short stature and gigantic whiskers lent themselves well to cartooning, just emerging as an art form. Then there were a huge number of people who simply despised him for specific reasons he could not control: people who still loathed Andrew Jackson, people estranged from the government, people who hated any interference with the economy (Jabez Hammond wrote that “the whole banking interest was against him”). Those debits added up to a substantial negative balance.

  Henry Adams called politics “the systematic organization of hatreds.” But even from the distance of almost two centuries, it is difficult to fathom why the attacks on Van Buren were so relentless. He generally handled them well, impressing observers with his magnanimity, but one time he privately remarked, “Why the deuce is it that they have such an itch for abusing me? I tried to be harmless, and positively good natured, & a most decided friend of peace.” Sometimes the most amiable politicians arouse the bitterest enemies—Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton immediately spring to mind. It’s as if their enemies can’t defeat them through ordinary political tactics and have to resort to the narrowest shortcut: pure, unadulterated rage. Van Buren was accused of every form of immorality. Because of the letter he had written to the pope in 1829 assuring that Catholics were treated decently in the United States, Whigs accused him of being secretly pro-Catholic. Because he admired the South and had many friends there, he was accused of being more pro-slavery than he was. Because he came from the North, he was accused of abolition, which also overstated his position. But perhaps the worst offense that he was accused of, unforgivable in the aftermath of the Panic, was personal extravagance.

  It was not true, of course. But there was no denying that Van Buren was careful about his appearance. Since that day when, barely a teenager, he had been rebuked by his first employer, he had never allowed himself to look like a country bumpkin. Now his fastidiousness came back to haunt him, as his enemies at last found a charge that would stick. A parti
cularly grotesque speech against Van Buren was given in Congress on April 14, 1840, just as the presidential campaign was heating up, by a Whig representative from Pennsylvania, Charles Ogle. Ogle was annoyed by an appropriations bill that had been sent by the White House to Congress, asking for $3,665 to be paid “for alterations and repair of the President’s House, and for the purchase of furniture, trees, shrubs, and compost, and for superintendence of the President’s grounds.” He also saw the chance for political blood sport. And so he gave a wildly distorted, hilarious speech that attacked Van Buren for every expenditure on the “Presidential Palace” that he had sought. The speech was so thorough in its catalog of purchases that historians still consult it, just to know what furniture was in the White House.

  Ogle began by asking the people of the United States if they were disposed to maintain a president in a “royal palace … as splendid as that of the Caesars and as richly adorned as the proudest Asiatic mansion.” He then went through all of the improvements that Van Buren had worked on, doubtless painstakingly, after finally moving into the White House. There was the “President’s Garden,” with its exotic plants, each of which sounded ridiculous when Ogle intoned their names in both Latin and English—the virgin’s bower, the touch-me-not, and, perhaps worst of all, the false foxglove.

  Then Ogle moved on to the landscaping:

  No, sir; mere meadows are too common to gratify the refined taste of an exquisite with “sweet sandy whiskers.” He must have undulations, “beautiful mounds, and other contrivances,” to ravish his exalted and ethereal soul. Hence, the reformers have constructed a number of clever sized hills, every pair of which, it is said, was designed to resemble and assume the form of AN AMAZON’S BOSOM, with a miniature knoll or hillock at its apex, to denote the n—ple.

  Ogle sarcastically suggested the grounds would be improved by a “colossal equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson with the little Kinderhook magician mounted on beside him.” Then he listed the inventory of new furniture, selecting certain objects to fit his theme … the French lamps with crystal globes, French mantel timepieces, French comfortables, eagle-mounted French bedsteads, and splendid French china vases. Inevitably, this kind of furniture would lead to the ultimate in presidential decorating: “a royal throne,” with “a crown, diadem, scepter and royal jewels.”

  From there Ogle got downright mean. Continuing the French theme, the cheapest insult in American politics, he lit into Van Buren’s character:

  It is worse, sir, because there is a degree of littleness in the thing which demonstrates as clearly as if it were written in characters of living light, that the soul of Martin Van Buren is so very, very, very diminutive, that it might find abundant space within the barrel of a milliner’s thimble to perform all the evolutions of the whirling pirouette avec chasse a suivant, according to the liberal gesticulation practiced by the most celebrated danseurs.

  He finished with just about the worst thing that could be said about an American political leader:

  How does the conduct of George Washington contrast on this subject with that of Martin Van Buren? Washington and Van Buren! Bless my soul, what a falling off! [Loud laughter.] Yes. What a fall was there, my countrymen! Then you, and I, and all of us fell down. After looking back down the long line of illustrious worthies who have occupied the Presidential chair in this country, is it not enough to make the heart of a patriot bleed, and to cover his cheek with blushes to see in what that illustrious line ends! What has Martin Van Buren ever done? Who can tell me?… I do not see what it is that such a nation as this should ever have made so much of so small a pattern of a man. He never originated any thing to benefit his country; he never fought to secure her glory; he has done nothing but plot to elevate himself; and yet here are we all thrown into turmoil about one little man, as if he was a hero or a statesman.

  Needless to say, these charges were outrageous. Van Buren’s crime was simply that he had upgraded a White House that was sorely in need of improvements. The Englishman James Silk Buckingham had gone to great lengths to describe the White House as “far from being elegant or costly” and “well adapted to the simplicity” of republican institutions, as was Van Buren’s “plain suit of black.” But there was an element of payback in Ogle’s charges that made the barb more poisonous. As Ogle himself pointed out, the Jacksonians had made a great deal of hay out of John Quincy Adams’s purchase of a billiard table and balls during the 1828 election—a charge that was as unfair as Ogle’s. As the manager of that election, Van Buren was certainly accountable. His outmaneuvering of John Calhoun was also mentioned in the speech; Calhoun’s partisans had never forgotten it. Now Van Buren received his comeuppance.

  Politics is about endless moves and countermoves, but there was something ugly in the personal invective used against Van Buren that did not bode well for the future of democracy. Ogle’s diatribe contained the seeds of countless future attacks against sitting presidents on the grounds of unseemly luxury—attacks that almost always came from people or parties who represented the party of privilege. Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were dismissed as fraudulent by their critics merely because they had inherited wealth, as if it somehow tainted their politics. Bill Clinton was lambasted early in his first term for an expensive haircut. Al Gore was pilloried for the unavoidable fact that he had grown up in a Washington hotel while his father was a senator. In recent years, the Republicans scored points against John Kerry simply for looking French—the same word that Ogle used over and over to brilliant effect. His speech was the only thing that Charles Ogle ever did that passed into the history books, but it was significant, and damaging.

  Yelping at the scent of a wounded fox, the Whigs threw everything into the campaign of 1840. It is still remembered as one of the great campaigns, and yet “great” seems too majestic a word for what was basically the cynical triumph of advertising over substance. After nominating the elderly military hero William Henry Harrison, the Whigs fell into paroxysms of excitement over the rumor that their candidate lived in a log cabin and had a fondness for hard cider. In fact, neither claim was true. Harrison was born into a considerably more substantial dwelling, an old brick mansion along the James River in Virginia. But that did not matter in the least. When in doubt, print the legend—and the image of an impoverished boy running around a log cabin entered the popular folklore, well before Lincoln ever figured out that modesty was a path to power.

  The great irony, of course, is that the log-cabin-and-hard-cider slogan was much truer of Van Buren’s life than his opponent’s, and that he was being outsmarted by a ruthless opposition that had mastered all of his techniques. But no one was interested in the truth in 1840—only in the result. The Whigs had developed a national organization that was every bit as efficient as Van Buren’s, and after learning from the outsider appeal of the early Jackson campaigns, they now saw an opportunity to steal some Democratic thunder.

  It is impossible to list all the dramatic moments of the 1840 campaign, but it’s clear that the election struck home with the electorate in a way that no previous election had. Perhaps it was the need to move beyond the Panic of 1837. Perhaps it was the greater suffrage that Van Buren himself had helped to usher in. Certainly, some of the zeal was contrived—in fact, most of it. But it was a movement all the same. The Whig strategists brilliantly stoked the fires of anti–Van Burenism. In May, Horace Greeley launched his paper the Log Cabin, which was soon selling eighty thousand copies weekly. Wild rumors spread about Van Buren, including outright lies that he was a closet Federalist, or that he had opposed the War of 1812, the very war that gave him his start. The charges grew nastier; one paper called him a “groveling demagogue” who had “slimed himself into the presidency.” A typical speaker played on his Dutch heritage: “Nothing short of Omnipotence can save the little cabbage eater.”

  Giant parades were held, including one at the Whig convention in Baltimore that may have included as many as 75,000 people. Huge balls were rolled across the co
untry to show Harrison’s building momentum. Manufacturers churned out an endless supply of cheap trinkets, from “Tippecanoe Shaving Soap or Log-Cabin Emollient” to “Tippecanoe Tobacco.” Liquor was especially prevalent in the hard-cider movement, and a new word entered the American vocabulary when the E.C. Booz Distillery of Philadelphia began to ship huge quantities of “Old Cabin Whiskey”—a.k.a. booze—in bottles shaped like log cabins. There was an undeniable sexual excitement to these frantic proceedings, and if women could not vote, they certainly came out in large numbers to laugh at their menfolk. Vice President Johnson was mortified, writing, “I am sorry to say that I have seen ladies joining in the [Whigs] and wearing ribands across their breast with two names printed on them.”

  Perhaps most effectively, a huge number of songs were written. The 1840 election might be as interesting to a musical as to a political historian. Greeley wrote with satisfaction, “Our songs are doing more good than anything else.… Really, I think every song is good for five hundred new subscribers.” “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” and “Van, Van, he’s a used up man” are only two of hundreds, probably thousands of ditties that were spun out and forgotten during that overheated summer. One went: “Old Tip he wears a homespun coat / He has no ruffled shirt-wirt-wirt / But Mat he has the golden plate / And he’s a little squirt-wirt-wirt.” The latter noise was supposed to be made while spitting a jet of tobacco juice through one’s teeth.

  The Democrats did what they could, but they struggled from the start of the campaign to define themselves. When the party gathered in Baltimore in May to confirm its nominees, there was deep opposition to Richard Johnson as vice president from all quarters. Van Buren persevered in getting him through, but many party members were unhappy, including Andrew Jackson in Tennessee.