Seven Events That Made America America (6 page)

Throughout, the star in Congress was former president John Quincy Adams—the only U.S. president to return to the House of Representatives after a term in the White House. Adams’s speaking skills enabled him to follow the gag rule while still raising anti-slavery issues.
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For example, Adams forced the Speaker to rule on whether each individual petition he received fell under the jurisdiction of the latest gag rule, altogether violating the intent of the rule itself. His actions finally resulted in a motion to have Adams censured. Then, when the Whigs had the majority, he got himself appointed to head the Rules Committee, which reported out rules that removed the gag provision. When finally, in 1844, the House rescinded the gag rule by a 28-vote margin, the victory belonged to Adams more than any other man.

Repeal of the gag rule constituted only the first thread to unravel from Van Buren’s garment to exclude slavery from national debate, and even there, the Democrats could not maintain party discipline. During the debate over the settlement of the Mexican War, Democratic congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania introduced a provision that slavery be prohibited in all territories acquired by the United States in the conflict. Hence, Van Buren’s own party abandoned the principle that slave politics should be excluded from the halls of Congress.

Two other key elements of Van Buren’s scheme to suppress the slave issue also spun out of his control. Government at the federal level had grown consistently bigger and more powerful. Ironically, the man who gave it the most muscle was Van Buren’s champion, Andrew Jackson. Old Hickory’s reputation as a small-government president is ill deserved, a myth based largely on his famous “war” on the Bank of the United States in 1832. In fact, the Bank War was a highly partisan power struggle with the influential president of the bank, Nicholas Biddle, who had great support among Jackson’s congressional foes. It had nothing to do with either economics or federalism, and certainly was not an example of limited-government libertarianism as so many of Jackson’s admirers have attempted to paint it. Jackson had ordered the drafting of his own plan for a national bank in 1829, and when he killed the BUS, he put the government deposits in state banks run by his political pals. Considerable evidence exists that he hoped to completely eliminate state paper money.
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Jackson issued more vetoes than all previous presidents combined, reversing the long tradition of “Whig” governance (the term in this instance does not refer to the party, but rather the view that the main source of popular will lay in the Congress, not the presidency).

The oft-overlooked aspect of Jackson’s many vetoes is that as
negative
demonstrations of presidential authority, they nevertheless
increased
the scope and power of the office itself, regardless of the intention that lay behind them. In other areas, though, Jackson made no mystery of his intention to dominate other branches. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him in the Cherokee removal, he uttered the famous phrase, “Justice Marshall has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.” Jackson (with legitimate cause) threatened to invade South Carolina and enforce the collection of tariff duties there. Nothing Andrew Jackson did actually weakened the federal government, and most of what he did greatly expanded the size and reach of the presidency. It was only a matter of time until someone who did not share Martin Van Buren’s goal of suppressing all discussion of slavery reached the White House.

A final failure of Van Buren’s plan involved the issue of patronage, for as the Whigs learned to play the game, with every election came more government jobs to be given away. Ensuring electoral success meant that a candidate had to promise more jobs than his opponent. Jefferson may have answered the White House door himself in his bathrobe and slippers, but the trends were such that by 1860 Abraham Lincoln spent every moment not fighting the war dealing with a seemingly endless line of political office holders, whose letters of appointment he had to sign. Even though he still ran the U.S. government essentially with only three personal aides, the burdens of dealing with the spoils at the end of every election had started to become apparent.

Thus, Van Buren’s nightmare only increased national debate about slavery (when he had sought to exclude it), increased the presence and intrusion of the federal government (when he had counted on limiting it), and increased the likelihood that if the government ever fell into the hands of a contrary ideology, its power would be such that slavery itself would not be safe. And that was precisely the case when Abraham Lincoln was elected. The Democrats had by then ceased to be a national party at all, fracturing into northern and southern wings that could not even agree on a presidential candidate. An entirely new party—using spoils as its instrument to win elections, but this time fueled and directed by a specific anti-slavery ideology—the Republicans, ditched Van Buren’s concept of a party devoid of principle and elevated the principle of anti-slavery to the top of its agenda.

Not only had he failed to keep slavery out of the national debate, Van Buren had devised a system that ensured it would be addressed at the national level, with the machinery of a vastly larger federal government. During the Civil War which followed, both the Union and Confederate governments accelerated the growth of government power. Both imposed income taxes, confiscated private property, enacted draft laws, printed unsecured money, silenced free speech, engaged in arrests that violated habeas corpus, and committed dozens of other violations of the principles of limited government. The excesses of Lincoln’s government were substantial, but research has shown that the Confederacy in fact was far more oppressive to the rights of free white citizens than the North.
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As historian Richard Bensel found, during the war, “two central states . . . were locked in mortal combat,” and the Confederacy pursued a “relatively statist war mobilization. In contrast, the northern war effort mobilized materiel and men by relying on voluntary contracts within a comparatively robust capitalist market.”
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Another unintended consequence of the war was that a giant lobbying organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, was formed to acquire benefits for veterans. Between 1865 and 1888, the GAR emerged as the largest nonbusiness special interest group in America, padding its rolls with thousands of “veterans,” many of whom never served in combat; it pleaded for those who had received war wounds to obtain restitution. Yet many never served, more still never fought, and still more were never wounded. Its ranks swelled beyond all imagination—when, given the age and physical health of the war survivors, the numbers should have declined steadily—until after the Compromise of 1877, the GAR floated the notion of paying veterans’ benefits to
Confederate
soldiers.

Eventually, the courageous president Grover Cleveland would personally rein in the GAR, by which time other unintended consequences of Van Buren’s party structure would be out of control. As long as government remained relatively small, the excesses of the spoils system likewise remained minimal. On a micro level, one could see the inevitable results, however: the Tweed Ring in New York City in the 1850s turned spoilsmanship into a high art, as the political agents of “Boss” William Marcy Tweed doled out largesse to anyone and everyone who helped keep the ring in power. Alexander Callow has detailed the staggering graft that went on under the Tweed Ring, which honed Van Buren’s political machine to perfection, stealing millions from the taxpayers of New York City.
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At one point, Tammany Hall (as Tweed’s operation was called, for the building out of which it operated) counted almost twelve thousand people whose livelihood directly depended on the Tweed Ring staying in power. The modus operandi for getting out the vote was accurately captured in Martin Scorsese’s film
Gangs of New York,
and was epitomized in the saying, “It’s not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes.” Tweed’s boys used intimidation to prevent opponents from getting to the polls, while at the same time they elevated to a fine art the practice of getting out the vote among their own supporters. Their practices included outright cash bribes, multiple voting by the same person, and scouring every alley and saloon for any breathing citizen who could cast a ballot for Tammany Hall.

It was a far cry from the voters in the age of Jefferson, who turned out at up to 80 percent rates because of a sense of duty, patriotism, and pride. Tweed’s voters were herded like livestock, told whom to vote for, and warned to not think for themselves.

Ultimately, though, the ring’s power came from the cash it doled out in the form of rewards to friends, particularly the Manufacturing Stationer’s Company, which got virtually all of New York City’s printing. On top of that, every patronage job involved a salary that the ring vastly inflated. But that was only the tip of the spoils iceberg. Because the ring controlled the Corporation Counsel office under Richard O’Gorman, it allowed cronies to file claims against the city, collect a commission, and then pay the claims at inflated prices. Judgments against the city attained all-time highs (over $400,000), while O’Gorman’s office racked up almost $153,000 in expenses. The Manufacturing Stationer’s Company proved to be the most fortunate, though, in sucking money out of the system. In 1870 alone, it received from the city $3 million, typical charges to those found on almost any other annual billing to the city.

While outrageous and astonishing on its own, the Tweed Ring demonstrated the direction patronage was sure to take, and spoils became the focus of political reform in the late 1860s and early 1870s—with “reform” itself usually making matters worse. Various groups, mostly within the Republican Party, sought to rein in the spoils system, in the process backing or opposing candidates who either favored spoils or wanted to end it. The most prominent of the patronage supporters were the “Stalwarts,” headed by Roscoe Conkling, who battled reformers such as Rutherford B. Hayes. Another prominent Stalwart, Chester A. Arthur of New York, was nominated as James Garfield’s vice president. Garfield, a “Half Breed” (the name given to enemies of the spoils system), favored instituting a civil service system based on examinations and a merit system. Garfield had been tainted in the Crédit Mobilier scandal, but not seriously so, and had only been in office a few months when Charles Guiteau, who had failed to get a spoils job, shot him in a railway station. Guiteau shouted, “I am a Stalwart. . . . Arthur is president now.”
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Garfield’s assassination galvanized the forces of reform, resulting in the passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in 1883, which created the United States Civil Service Commission, placing most federal employees on a merit system. No longer would competent postmasters and customs collectors be yanked from their jobs merely because of the results of an election.
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While that appeared both humane and practical, it constituted a massive expansion of the spoils system and patronage, taking it to an entirely different level. Where Boss Tweed and Martin Van Buren only had to promise a few thousand jobs directly to supporters in every election to ensure victory, that option disappeared after 1883. Instead, the Pendleton Act made matters worse because it forced politicians to promise entire programs and legislation in scattershot form that would appeal to larger numbers of voters. Thus, instead of promising a few ward and precinct jobs to cronies, the post-Pendleton politician had to promise masses of jobs cloaked in “support” for such programs as public works, then later, NASA, defense, protectionism for industry, the environment, and hundreds of other areas.

For example, a presidential candidate speaking in Dayton, Ohio, before a large crowd of residents dependent on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for employment could legitimately say, “I favor a strong national defense” and certainly some in the audience applaud him for supporting the military. But just as many would interpret that as saying, “I favor a strong commitment to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and all the jobs it brings,” and they would be right. The same candidate in Iowa might support ethanol subsidies because he genuinely believes it would improve America’s energy problem, but it would just as likely represent that candidate’s awareness that he needs the votes of Iowa’s farmers. What changed between Van Buren’s original structure and the Pendleton “reform” was not the fundamental element of the system—that politicians exchanged jobs for votes—but merely the
number
of those directly affected by such giveaways!

The Founders, both Federalists and anti-Federalists, were suspicious of big government and terrified of the tyranny that an unchecked government might bring. James Madison carefully balanced the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, while the other members of the Constitutional Convention worked diligently to secure the rights of the states within the federal system. To
all
of them, “big government” constituted a serious threat. Even Hamilton, widely considered to be a big-government politician, feared that the masses would gain control of the Treasury and vote themselves taxpayer benefits. While Federalist fathers such as George Washington, John Adams, and James Madison all agreed that a more powerful central government than the Articles of Confederation offered was necessary, none approved of handing out jobs for political support, and all detested the concept of national leaders running for office by, essentially, buying votes. Van Buren not only failed to prevent the war that he intended to avoid, but he bequeathed to the United States a party system that depended on the delivery of jobs as its life-blood. It’s hard to imagine one man, regardless of his good intentions, who has done more damage to the nation, unless it would be our next subject, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney.