Chapter XI (2)

Van Buren did live, however, long after his honorable battle and defeat; and lived to dim its honor by the faltering of mistaken patriotism. In 1849, John Van Buren, during the efforts to unite the Democratic party in New York, declared it his wish to make it "the great anti-slavery party of the Union." Early in 1850 and when the compromise was threatened at Washington, he wrote to the Free-soil convention of Connecticut that there had never been a time when the opponents of slavery extension were more urgently called to act with energy and decision or to hold their representatives to a rigid responsibility, if they faltered or betrayed their trust. With little doubt his father approved these utterances. A year later, however, the ex-President, with nearly all Northern men, yielded to the soporific which Clay in his old age administered to the American people. In their support of the great compromise between slavery and freedom, Webster and Clay forfeited much of their fame, and justly. For though the cause of humanity gained a vast political advantage in the admission of California as a free State, the advantage, it was plain, could not have been long delayed had there been no compromise. But the rest of the new territory was thrown into a struggle among its settlers, although the power of Congress over the Territories was not yet denied; and a fugitive-slave law of singular atrocity was passed. All the famous Northern Whigs were now true "doughfaces." Fillmore, president through Taylor's death, one of the most dignified and timid of their number, signed the compromise bills.

The compromise being passed, Van Buren with almost the entire North submissively sought to believe slavery at last expelled from politics. It would have been a wise heroism, it would have given Van Buren a clearer, a far higher place with posterity, if after 1848 he had even done no more than remain completely aloof from the timid politics of the time, if he had at least refused acquiescence in any compromise by which concessions were made to slavery. But he was an old man. He shared with his ancient and famous Whig rivals that intense love and almost adoration of the Union, upon which the arrogant leaders of the South so long and so successfully played. The compromise was accomplished. It would perhaps be the last concession to the furious advance of the cruel barbarism. The free settlers in the new Territories would, he hoped, by their number and hardihood, defeat the incoming slave-owners, and even under "squatter sovereignty" save their homes from slavery. If the Union should now stand without further disturbance, all might still come right without civil war. Economic laws, the inexorable and beneficent progress of civilization, would perhaps begin, slowly indeed but surely, to press to its death this remnant of ancient savagery. But if the Union were to be broken by a violation of the compromise, a vast and irremediable catastrophe and ruin would undo all the patriotic labors of sixty years, would dismiss to lasting unreality the dreams of three generations of great men who had loved their country. It seemed too appalling a responsibility.

Upon all this reasoning there is much unfair modern judgment. The small number of resolute abolitionists, who cared little for the Union in comparison with the one cause of human rights, and whose moral fervor found in the compromises of the Constitution, so dear and sacred to all American statesmen, only a covenant with hell, may for the moment be ignored. Among them there was not a public man occupying politically responsible or widely influential place. The vast body of Northern sentiment was in two great classes. The one was led by men like Seward, and even Benton, who considered the South a great bully. They believed that to a firm front against the extension of slavery the South would, after many fire-eating words, surrender in peace. The other class included most of the influential men of the day, some of them greater men, some lesser, and some little men. Webster, Clay, Cass, Buchanan, Marcy, Douglas, Fillmore, Dickinson, were now joined by Van Buren and by many Free-soil men of 1848 daunted at the seeming slowness with which the divine mills were grinding. They believed that the South, to assert the fancied "rights" of their monstrous wrong, would accept disunion and even more, that in this cause it would fiercely accept all the terrors of a civil war and its limitless devastation. The event proved the first men utterly in the wrong; and it was fortunate that their mistake was not visible until in 1861 the battle was irreversibly joined. The second and more numerous class were right. There had to be yielding, unless such evils were to be let loose, unless Webster's "ideas, so full of all that is horrid and horrible," were to come true. The anxiety not to offend the South was perhaps most strikingly shown after the election of Lincoln. A distinguished statesman of the modern Republican party has recently pointed out[19] that in February, 1861, the Republican members of Congress, and among them Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, acquiesced in the organization of the new Territories of Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada, without any prohibition of slavery, thus ignoring the very principle and the only principle upon which their great battle had been fought and their great victory won.

Complete truth dwelt only with the small and hated abolitionist minority. Without honored and influential leaders in political life they alone saw that war with all these horrors was better, or even a successful secession was better, than further surrender of human rights, a surrender whose corruption and barbarism would cloud all the glories, and destroy all the beneficence of the Union. No historical judgment has been more unjust and partial than the implied condemnation of Van Buren for his acquiescence in Clay's compromise, while only gentle words have chided the great statesmen whose eloquence was more splendid and inspiring but whose devotion to the Union was never more supreme than Van Buren's,--statesmen who had made no sacrifice like his in 1844, who in their whitening years had taken no bold step like his in 1848, and who had in 1850 actively promoted the surrender to which Van Buren did no more than submit after it was accomplished.

In 1852 the overwhelming agreement to the compromise brought on a colorless presidential campaign, fought in a sort of fool's paradise. Its character was well represented by Franklin Pierce, the second Democratic mediocrity raised to the first place in the party and the land, and by the absurd political figure of General Scott, fitly enough the last candidate of the decayed Whig party. Both parties heartily approved the compromise, but it mattered little which of the two candidates were chosen. The votes cast for John P. Hale, the Free-soil candidate, were as much more significant and honorable as they were fewer than those cast for Pierce or Scott. Van Buren, in a note to a meeting in New York, declared that time and circumstances had issued edicts against his attendance, but that he earnestly wished for Pierce's election. He attempted no argument in this, perhaps the shortest political letter he ever wrote. But John Van Buren, in a speech at Albany, gave some reasons which prevent much condemnation of his father's perfunctory acquiescence in the action of his party. The movement of 1848, he said, had been intended to prevent the extension of slavery. Since then, California had come in, a Free State, and not, as the South had desired, a slave State; and "the abolition of the slave market in the District of Columbia was another great point gained." The poverty of reasons was shown in the eager insistence that every member of Congress from New Hampshire had voted against slavery extension, and that the Democratic party now took its candidate from that State "without any pledges whatever."

After this election Van Buren spent two years in Europe. President Pierce tendered him the position of the American arbitrator upon the British-American claims commission established under the treaty of February 8, 1853, but he declined. During his absence the South secured the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the practical opening to slavery of the new Territories north of the line of 36° 30'. If the settlers of Kansas, which lay wholly on the free side of that compromise line, desired slavery, they were to have it. But even this was not sufficient. The hardy settlers of this frontier, separated though they were by the slave State of Missouri from free soil and free influences, would, it now seemed, pretty certainly favor freedom. The ermine of the Supreme Court had, therefore, to be used to sanctify with the Dred Scott decision the last demand of slavery, inconsistent though it was with the claims of the South from the time when it secured the Missouri Compromise until Calhoun grimly advanced his monstrous propositions. Slavery was to be decreed a constitutional right in all Territories, whose exercise in them Congress was without power to prohibit, and which could not be prevented even by the majority of their settlers until they were admitted as States.

Van Buren came back to America when there was still secret within the judicial breast the momentous decision that the American flag carried human slavery with it to conquered territory as a necessary incident of its stars and stripes, and that Congress could not, if it would, save the land to freedom. Van Buren voted for Buchanan; a vote essentially inconsistent with his Free-soil position, a vote deeply to be regretted. He still thought that free settlers would defeat the intention of the Kansas-Nebraska act, and bring in, as they afterwards did, a free though bleeding Kansas. There was something crude and menacing in this new Republican party, and in its enormous and growing enthusiasm. It was hard to believe that its candidate had been seriously selected for chief magistrate of the United States. Fremont probably seemed to Van Buren a picturesque sentimentalist leading the way to civil war, which, if it were to come, ought, so it seemed to this former senator and minister and president, to be led in by serious and disciplined statesmen. The new party was repulsive to him as a body chiefly of Whigs; old and bitter adversaries whom he distrusted, with hosts of camp-followers smelling the coming spoils. All this a young man might endure, when he saw the clear fact that the Republican convention, ignoring for the time all former differences, had pronounced not a word inconsistent with the Democratic platform of 1840, and had made only the one declaration essential to American freedom and right, that slavery should not go into the Territories. Van Buren was not, however, a young man, or one of the few old men in whom a fiery sense of morality, and an eager and buoyant resolution, are unchilled by thinner and slower blood, and indomitably overcome the conservative influences of age. A bold outcry from him, even now, would have placed him for posterity in one of the few niches set apart to the very greatest Americans. But since 1848 Van Buren had come to seventy-four years.

Invited to the Tammany Hall celebration of Independence Day, he wrote, on June 28, 1856, a letter in behalf of Buchanan. There was no diminution in explicit clearness; but hope was nearly gone; the peril of the Union obscured every other danger; the South was so threatening that patriotism seemed to him to require at the least a surrender to all that had passed; and for the future our best reliance would be upon a fair vote in Kansas between freedom and slavery. He could not come to its meeting, he told Tammany Hall, because of his age. He had left one invitation unanswered; and if he were so to leave another, he might be suspected of a desire to conceal his sentiments. But this letter should be his last, as it was his first, appearance in the canvass. He was glad of the Democratic reunion; for although not always perfectly right, in no other party had there been "such exclusive regard and devotion to the maintenance of human rights and the happiness and welfare of the masses of the people." There was a touch of age in his fond recitals of the long services of that party since, in Jefferson's days, it had its origin with "the root-and-branch friends of the Republican system;" of its support of the war of 1812; of its destruction of the national bank; of its establishment of an independent treasury. But slavery, he admitted, was now the living issue. Upon that he had no regrets for his course. He had always preferred the method of dealing with that institution practiced by the founders of the government. He lamented the recent departure from that method; no one was more sincerely opposed than himself to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. He had heard of it, and condemned it in a foreign land; he had there foreseen the disastrous reopening of the slavery agitation. But the measure was now accomplished; there was no more left than to decide what was the best now to do. The Kansas-Nebraska act had, he said, gradually become less obnoxious to him; though this impression, he admitted, might result from the unanimous acquiescence in it of the party in which he had been reared. Its operation, he trusted, would be beneficial; and he had now come to believe that the feelings and opinions of the free States would be more respected under its provisions than by specific congressional interference. He did not doubt the power of Congress to enable the people of a Territory to exclude slavery. Buchanan's pledge to use the presidential power to restore harmony among the sister States could be redeemed in but one way; and that was, to secure to the actual settlers of the Territory a "full, free, and practical enjoyment" of the rights of suffrage on the slavery question conferred by the act. He praised Buchanan, if not exuberantly, still sufficiently. He must, Van Buren thought, be solicitous for his reputation in the near "evening of his life." He believed that Buchanan would redeem his pledge, and should therefore cheerfully support him. If Buchanan were elected, there were "good grounds for hope" that the Union might be saved. Such was this saddening and despondent letter. It was a defense of a vote which it was rather sorry work that he should have needed to make. But the tramp of armies and the conflagration of American institutions were heard and seen in the sky with terrifying vividness. The letter secured, however, no forgiveness from the angry South. The "Richmond Whig" said: "If there is a man within the limits of the Republic who is cordially abhorred and detested by intelligent and patriotic men of all parties at the South, that man is Martin Van Buren."

Many of the best Americans shared Van Buren's distrust of Fremont and of those who supported Fremont; they shared his love of peace and his fear of that bloodshed, North and South, which seemed the dismal El Dorado to which the "pathfinder's" feet were surely tending. So the majority of the Northern voters thought; for those north of Mason and Dixon's line who divided themselves between Buchanan and Fillmore, the candidate of the "Silver Gray" Whigs, considerably outnumbered the voters for Fremont.

In 1860 Van Buren voted for the union electoral ticket which represented in New York the combined opposition to Lincoln. Every motive which had influenced him in 1856 had now increased even more than his years. The Republican party was not only now come bringing, it seemed, the torch in full flame to light an awful conflagration; but in its second national convention there became obvious upon the tariff question the preponderance of the Whig elements, which made up the larger though not the more earnest or efficient body of its supporters.

After Van Buren's return from Europe in 1855, he lived in dignified and gracious repose. This complete and final escape from the rush about him had often seemed in his busy strenuous years full of delight. But doubtless now in the peaceful pleasures of Lindenwald and in the occasional glimpses of the more crowded social life of New York which was glad to honor him, there were the regrets and slowly dying impatience, the sense of isolation, which must at the best touch with some sadness the later and well-earned and even the best-crowned years. At this time he began writing memoirs of his life and times, which were brought down to the years 1833-1834; but they were never revised by him and have not been published. Out of this work grew a sketch of the early growth of American parties, which was edited by his sons and printed in 1867. Its pages do not exhibit the firm and logical order which was so characteristic of Van Buren's political compositions. It was rather the reminiscence of the political philosophy which had completely governed him. With some repetitions, but in an easy and interesting way, he recalled the far-reaching political differences between Jefferson and Hamilton. In these chapters of his old age are plain the profound and varied influences which had been exercised over him by the great founder of his party, and his unquenchable animosity towards "the money power" from the days of the first secretary of the treasury to its victory of "buffoonery" in 1840. In one chapter, with words rather courtly but still not to be mistaken, he condemns Buchanan for a violation of the principles of Jefferson and Jackson in accepting the Dred Scott decision as a rule of political action; and this the more because its main conclusion was unnecessary to adjudge Dred Scott's rights in that suit, and because its announcement was part of a political scheme. Chief Justice Taney and Buchanan, Van Buren pointed out, though raised to power by the Democratic party, had joined it late in life, "with opinions formed and matured in an antagonist school." Both had come from the Federalist ranks, whose political heresy Van Buren believed to be hopelessly incurable.

At the opening of the civil war Van Buren's animosity to Buchanan's behavior became more and more marked. He strongly sympathized with the uprising of the North; and sustained the early measures of Lincoln's administration. But he was not to see the dreadful but lasting and benign solution of the problem of American slavery. His life ended when the fortunes of the nation were at their darkest; when McClellan's seven days' battle from the Chickahominy to the James was just over, and the North was waiting in terror lest his troops might not return in time to save the capital. For several months he suffered from an asthmatic attack, which finally became a malignant catarrh, causing him much anguish. In the latter days of his sickness his mind wandered; but when sensible and collected he still showed a keen interest in public affairs, expressed his confidence in President Lincoln and General McClellan, and declared his faith that the rebellion would end without lasting damage to the Union.

On July 24, 1862, he died, nearly eighty years old, in the quiet summer air at Lindenwald, the noise of battle far away from his green lawns and clumps of trees. In the ancient Dutch church at Kinderhook the simple funeral was performed; and a great rustic gathering paid the last and best honor of honest and respectful grief to their old friend and neighbor. For his fame had brought its chief honor to this village of his birth, the village to which in happy ending of his earthly career he returned, and where through years of well-ordered thrift, of a gentle and friendly hospitality, and of interesting and not embittered reminiscence, he had been permitted

"To husband out life's taper at the close,
And keep the flame from wasting by repose."