Seven Events That Made America America (2 page)

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO EDWARD CARRINGTON, MAY 27, 1788

 

 

 

 

W
hen New York state senator Martin Van Buren, a leader of the “Bucktail” group of Jeffersonian Republicans, heard about the impending statehood bill for Missouri in 1819, he had a nightmare. Not a literal interruption of sleep—legend has it that, in fact, it was Thomas Jefferson who said the news of the subsequent Missouri Compromise, which admitted Missouri into the Union, awoke him like a “fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.”
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Van Buren’s nightmare involved matters closer to New York, namely, the battle with the forces of De Witt Clinton over control of that state’s political machine. But even at that early point in his career, Van Buren feared that the opponents of slavery in Missouri would “bring the politics of the slave states and . . . their supporters in the free states into disrepute through inflammatory assaults on the institution of slavery.”
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The admission of Missouri, a slave state, would threaten to disrupt the volatile harmony the Union had achieved over the issue of slavery. Though sharply divided on the issue, the nation had, it seemed, learned to live with the “peculiar institution,” but tipping the balance of power in favor of one side could potentially rend asunder the young Republic. One way or another, the territorial expansion resulting from the vast land acquired during the Louisiana Purchase would elevate one side or the other—pro-slave or anti-slave—to a dominant position in the government, and the loser in that struggle would not accept the verdict.

Compromise had been part of the American fabric from the beginning, and not only because of the slavery issue. As the result of the Constitutional Convention, two titanic compromises shaped the nation from the outset. First, the famed “Connecticut Compromise,” which addressed the issue of state representation in the federal government, balanced the concerns of the “big states” and “small states” by providing for a House of Representatives elected by the people of their districts, and a Senate, whose members were (at the time) elected by the state legislatures. All legislation had to pass both houses to become law. A second great compromise at the Convention involved slavery (and representation, too, in a different manner). Southern states wanted to count slaves for purposes of representation, but not for federal taxation; northern states wanted to count slaves for taxation, but not representation. The Convention agreed to count a slave as “three-fifths of a person” for both representation and taxation, over time providing a surprisingly dramatic advantage for the South. Federal taxation as envisioned never materialized, while the South benefited from about a 4 percent increase in their number of House seats.
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Where the “three-fifths compromise” endowed the South with a permanent (though shrinking, due to slower population growth than their neighbors to the North) representative advantage, the Missouri Compromise threatened to do just the opposite. Under the agreement, two territories, Maine (free) and Missouri (slave), would become states. A balance in the Senate was maintained, and while no one could predict the eventual populations of either, the change in the House would likely be negligible. Trouble began when Congress established an imaginary line from the southern tip of Missouri all the way through the Louisiana Purchase, located at the 36 degree-30 minute line of latitude. Under the Compromise, from that point forward, slavery would be prohibited in any Louisiana Purchase territories above the line when they became states, while below the line (“Arkansas Territory,” an area that amounted to modern-day Arkansas and most of Oklahoma) slavery would be permitted but was not automatic. Free-soil territory encompassed most of modern-day Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and part of Minnesota. No one at the time knew exactly how many states would eventually be carved out of these lands, but Northerners and Southerners alike could anticipate perhaps a dozen free-soil senators and at least twice as many congressmen coming from states that emerged from that land. That possibility threatened to establish a powerful northern majority that at some future date could attempt to legislate slavery out of existence—a consequence the South could not entertain. Ultimately, it threatened disunion and war.

Van Buren’s response to this nightmare was to begin shaping a new political structure, first in New York and eventually throughout the nation. As pro- and anti-Clinton newspapers arrayed over the Missouri issue (with Van Buren’s Bucktails, so called because of the deer tails they wore on their hats, accused of supporting slavery), Van Buren was more concerned with the politics of sectionalism than with the morality of this so-called peculiar institution. As early as 1819 Van Buren straddled the slavery issue—during one key meeting on his party’s response to the Missouri issue he was conveniently out of town—and as state senator he avoided having to take a position when a resolution against slavery passed without a recorded vote. The notion that such a divisive issue could be skirted, perhaps permanently, germinated within the Dutchman. But it required some mechanism to ensure that slavery did not overtake the politics of the nation. The answer, it seemed, was to apply what Van Buren learned in New York to the country as a whole.

Working with other Bucktails, Van Buren became instrumental in creating what was termed the “Albany Regency,” which created a new political machine and introduced a new theory of political parties, thereby revolutionizing American politics. Many of the Founders had warned against partisanship—yet none had a reasonable alternative. George Washington, in particular, clung to an unrealistic view of America in which a spirit of national unity and harmony would prevail, warning about the “baneful effects of the Spirit of Party” in his Farewell Address.
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Interestingly, however, Washington qualified his admonition “with particular reference to the founding of [parties]
on geographical discriminations
.” What was particularly destructive, he saw, were sectional parties oriented around the issue of slavery.

Madison also expressed concerns about the dangerous effects of faction, which he defined as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Yet he admitted that the only way to eliminate factions was to either abuse liberty, which he found unacceptable, or give “to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.”
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That, too, was utterly unacceptable.
Federalist
No. 51, written by either Madison or Alexander Hamilton, concluded that parties were probably necessary: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

The Albany Regency developed a much different political theory, though not entirely out of line with
Federalist
No. 51, and in Van Buren’s words, “political parties are inseparable from free governments.”
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As his party’s newspaper, the
Argus
, put it, parties checked “the passions, the ambition, and the usurpations of individuals.”
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Neither Hamilton nor Madison would have said it any differently. As early as 1821, Van Buren (by then also known as the “Red Fox of Kinderhook”) had begun employing the “rule” of “to the victor belong the spoils,” the spoils in this case being political patronage. The practice of giving jobs to the election winner’s friends constituted a tool in the politician’s arsenal by which he could reward supporters. Given the small size of the federal government and most state governments at the time, patronage was usually limited to a few customs positions, a handful of law enforcement jobs, and, in the case of the U.S. government, a growing number of post office appointments. Beyond that, aspiring political leaders had little to promise those who helped elect them.

Van Buren began with a “
general resuscitation
of the
old democratic party
” (emphasis his) in 1822, by which he meant the Jeffersonian democratic party. To modern readers, this invites confusion because by that time the Jeffersonians were known as the
Republicans
(from “Democratic Republicans”) as opposed to the opposition party, the Federalists. He allied with Thomas Ritchie, editor of the
Richmond Enquirer
, and other Virginians who were building the “Richmond junto” up to the same stature as the Albany Regency. Together, the “Richmond-Albany axis” could run the country, terrifying such leaders as South Carolinian John C. Calhoun: “between [them],” he exclaimed, “there is a vital connection. They give and receive hope from each other, and confidently expect to govern this nation.”
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Van Buren—like De Witt Clinton and other political organizers—built on the Jeffersonian foundation of the caucus. Caucuses were state bodies of largely self-appointed men who had money and influence and acted as regional kingmakers. But the caucus began to lose its power as the property requirement to vote was lifted in state after state, meaning that the vote of the “common man” suddenly counted for almost as much as the support of a few wealthy individuals. Van Buren did not create this, and he certainly did not initiate the end of voting restrictions; nor did he originate party newspapers as propaganda tools. But like Henry Ford with the auto and Bill Gates with operating systems, he immediately grasped the totality of the parts and began reshaping New York politics from the inside, convincing others to develop a party organization that reached down to local levels through a state, district, ward, and precinct arrangement. Under this framework, the party established levels of responsibility for getting out the vote on election day: the state coordinated and funded candidates and directed the districts or counties; district and county organizations made sure that every ward and precinct was staffed with “captains,” who, on election day, literally walked the streets and encouraged voters to go to the polls. County and district organizations also helped transmit funds downward to local candidates from the state level. Over time, Van Buren and his allies added newspapers as rallying devices to further ensure turnout.

When Van Buren—by then known as the “Little Magician” for his dexterity at putting together political deals—became a U.S. senator and left for Washington in 1821, he sought to transplant his new party on a national level. Still technically a slave owner (his slave had run away eight years earlier), Van Buren again sought to have it both ways, arguing on the side of Northerners to limit the spread of slavery while comforting Southerners by defending the existence of slavery in the South. His thinking evolved slowly, but steadily, toward a position of strong states’ rights, constrained further by a national party that would avoid direct confrontation with slavery, all enforced by the discipline of spoils. This would, he thought, prevent disunion and war.

Within forty years, however, it became shockingly obvious that Van Buren failed in this immediate objective and, ironically, the very system he founded would help bring on the pivotal and decisive conflict over slavery. Yet the carnage and heartbreak of the Civil War reached far beyond the 600,000 dead and the decades of sectional hatred and distrust. Van Buren’s legacy to the American people contained one final paradox: seeking to limit the power of the federal government to act on slavery within the states, Van Buren forged a system that ensured and accelerated the relentless, permanent, and inescapable growth of government. When critics of modern-day “special-interest politics” bemoan the fact that presidential campaigns (like all others) have descended into exercises in pandering to interest groups, it’s not unfair to lay this at the feet of Martin Van Buren. And when Barack Obama won the presidency in large part by appealing to formerly “oppressed minorities,” it’s fair to say Martin Van Buren elected him . . . in 1820.

Creating a massive bureaucracy beholden to special interests was absolutely not Van Buren’s intention. Indeed, he never even imagined the possibility of such a state of affairs. State and national expenditures were not only small at the time, but tightly confined by both the U.S. and most state constitutions: what little money there was could not be spent willy-nilly or handed out to cronies. For example, in 1800 the entire U.S. government spent only $11 million for a nation of 5.3 million people.
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By 1820, the budget had nearly doubled, but so had the population, with over half of the spending dedicated to national defense and none to “welfare” or “education.” Interest on the debt claimed one-quarter of the government’s revenues (as opposed to, depending on the calculation, 8 to 10 percent today), and “other spending,” or transfers within government agencies and to the states, made up the final quarter.

That’s not to say there was not an inherent bias for growth, however tiny, built into the system. U.S. government employees numbered 5,000 in 1816, but multiplied dramatically after 1830, to over 25,000 by 1850. Of course, the population of the United States also rose, but even adjusted per capita, the number of government employees per person nearly doubled over that same period. Although real per capita government expenditures fell slightly under Jefferson, Monroe, and John Adams, and rapidly under Van Buren, they spiked radically upward under Madison (partly as a result of the War of 1812), Jackson, and John Tyler. But even in Madison’s first two nonwar years in office, real expenditures rose; James Monroe promised in his inaugural address to build a network of canals and roads to “shorten distances . . . and bind the Union more closely together”; and under Jackson (supposedly a small-government president) government spending sky-rocketed, more than doubling with no foreign conflict and no major land acquisitions.
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Despite a general trend of increasing expenditures per person, federal government spending prior to 1850 still amounted to less than $3 per person per year.