The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  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.”27

  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.”28 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.”29 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.”30

  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.”31

  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.”32 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

  After 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.1

  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 t
o 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.2 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.3

  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.4 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.

  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.”5 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.”6

  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 a
greed 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.