The American Vice Presidency (17 page)

As the congressional argument over the bank dragged on, including a Senate resolution to censure Jackson, Van Buren continued to counsel the president to soften his responses, and the legislative session ended with the Second Bank of the United States still interred and the fight over. Jacksonian Democracy was firmly established, but the strong sentiment against Jackson himself among the splintered opposition led to the coalescence of what came to be called the Whig Party. As Jackson had fully intended, Van Buren would use the vice presidency as a stepping-stone to the Democratic presidential nomination in 1836 and then election.

But for all the knowledge and experience he gained from being at
Jackson’s elbow as his lieutenant as well as his standby, Van Buren as president was soon the victim of an economic depression and what came to be called the panic of 1837. In the process, he acquired a new nickname: “Martin Van Ruin.” In
The National Experience: A History of the United States
, it is said of him that he “was a pale copy of his chief” and had none of Jackson’s talents to deal with the collapse of the economy.
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In 1840, he lost his bid for reelection to the Whig nominee, General William Henry Harrison, another War of 1812 hero, as the Whigs chanted, “Van, Van, he’s a used-up man.”

Van Buren retired to his Kinderhook estate to contemplate a possible comeback and, in the spring of 1842, made an extensive southern and western swing to assess his prospects. But he lost the party nomination in 1844 to the dark horse governor James K. Polk of Tennessee at a wild convention at which Polk first sought only the vice presidential nomination. Van Buren tried again as the nominee of the new Free Soil Party but lost to still another military hero, General Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate, and lived long enough to witness the secession of the southern states and the start of the Civil War. He died at his home in New York’s Hudson Valley on July 24, 1862, at age seventy-nine.

Van Buren probably came closer than any previous vice president in playing key administrative roles in both domestic and foreign affairs. Upon assuming the presidency, however, the earlier access to and close association with his predecessor were not enough to make his single term a success. Rather, his greatest political contribution was his prime role in building Jacksonian Democracy and the Democratic Party itself.

RICHARD MENTOR JOHNSON

OF KENTUCKY

A
s the presidential election year of 1836 approached, the lame-duck president Jackson had already resolved that his handpicked vice president, Martin Van Buren, would be the presidential nominee of the Jacksonian Democratic Party, of which he had been the principal architect. As for a running mate, Jackson and others concluded that it would be best to nominate a westerner to balance the New Yorker, who, while highly regarded for his political acumen, aroused reservations elsewhere in the country. For the first time under the Twelfth Amendment, however, the choice would fall to the United States Senate.

In Tennessee, some original Jackson men who were cool to Van Buren pushed the rival presidential candidacy of Senator Hugh Lawson White of their state, and Jackson felt White’s strength also signaled the need for a Van Buren running mate from the West, particularly someone who had been loyal to Jackson. With Jackson’s own pending retirement, another hero of the War of 1812, but of considerably less luster, emerged in Congressman Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky. As an army colonel in 1813, he claimed to have killed the feared Shawnee Indian chief Tecumseh, allied with the British, in the Battle of the Thames, in Ontario, Canada, northeast of Detroit.
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The claim was never verified beyond a report that Tecumseh, in the course of a tomahawk charge, had fallen from a bullet fired by an American
officer on horseback, Johnson having been mounted at the time. When the war broke out, Johnson had formed two mounted regiments under the governor of the Indiana Territory, General William Henry Harrison. Under Harrison’s command, Johnson and his troops had crossed into Canada in pursuit of the British general Henry Proctor and the Shawnee Indians accompanying him, who had been attacking American settlements. Johnson’s reported encounter with Tecumseh, given the fame it brought him, proved to be the pivotal event of his life.
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But aside from that, Johnson had compiled an impressive record in the Kentucky legislature before the war and also did so as a thirty-year member of the U.S. Congress, serving at different times in the House and Senate between 1807 and 1837. He was one of the “War Hawks” led by House Speaker Henry Clay, who pushed President Madison to take up arms against the British for attacks on American shipping and frontier settlements and who voted to declare war in 1812. Much wounded in the frontier warfare, Johnson returned to Congress in 1814 and as a senator became an ardent Jackson supporter. As a frontiersman, he was a defender of the farmer and distrustful of bankers and speculators and, as a military man, a champion of veterans, their wives or widows, and their children.

In 1819, when Jackson faced the censure sought by Clay for the execution of two British citizens as spies during the Seminole Indian war, Johnson was among the general’s defenders in Congress. He voted for Jackson in 1824, when the presidential election against John Quincy Adams was thrown into the House. He was also said to have been the one to inform Jackson of Adams’s appointment of Clay as secretary of state in the “corrupt bargain,” which sealed Jackson’s commitment to Johnson thereafter.

Johnson at first was touted among western supporters as a presidential candidate, a natural successor to Jackson, a fellow frontiersman and warrior against the Indians. Circulation of pamphlets casting him as the next Jackson spread through the West along with a biography and even a play,
Tecumseh, or the Battle of the Thames
, featuring the Johnson character as hero.
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Van Buren himself was not thrilled over the prospects of Johnson as his running mate. He would have preferred the former senator William C. Rives of Virginia, Jackson’s minister to Paris in his first term, in furthering restoration of the alliance between the two bedrock states of the Jeffersonian
era. At the same time Van Buren was peeved over the constant southern complaints about him, accusing him of abolitionist sentiments, despite all his efforts to accommodate the South. “God knows I have suffered enough for my Southern partialities,” he wrote to Rives’s wife. “Since I was a boy I have been stigmatized as the apologist of Southern institutions, & now forsooth you good people will have it … that I am an abolitionist.”
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Rives felt his service to Jackson had been brushed aside and with it the special tie between New York and Virginia, but Jackson felt strongly about having a westerner on the ticket and could not be ignored.

Van Buren also was concerned about Johnson’s reputation for some shady deals involving his kin and even more so about his more immediate family life. Despite later accounts that he had had a log-cabin boyhood, his father became one of Kentucky’s largest landowners, and his mother was said to have broken off his early engagement with a young woman because she felt the bride-to-be was unworthy. Supposedly out of revenge after his father’s death, young Johnson took a mulatto slave girl named Julia Chinn, left to him by his father, and treated her as his common-law wife.
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He gave her control over his business affairs and educated their two children. When she died, the story went, he took up with another slave girl, and when she left him for another man, Johnson had her sold at auction and began a relationship with her sister.

Somehow all this did not derail his rise in Kentucky politics, although it drew wide condemnation of him later as a prospective vice president. Chief Justice John Catron of the Tennessee Supreme Court complained that Johnson was “not only positively unpopular with that class who give tone to a public man, but affirmatively odious” in Tennessee.
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He warned Jackson, “The very moment Col. J. is announced [as Van Buren’s running mate], the newspapers will open upon him with facts, that he had endeavored often to force his daughters into society, that the mother in her life time, and they now, rode in carriages, and claimed equality.”
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The judge also observed of Johnson’s abilities that he wanted “capacity, a fact generally known and universally admitted.” He urged Jackson, “Assure our friends that the humblest of us do not believe that a lucky random shot, even if it did kill Tecumseh, qualifies a man for the Vice Presidency.”
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But with Jackson headed for retirement after his two terms, the
Democratic ticket lacked the glamour of the Hero of New Orleans. So perhaps giving Van Buren, who had never served in the military and lacked Jackson’s personal popularity, another old war hero as his running mate would add luster. Playing on Johnson’s image as a frontiersman rather than on his long service in Congress, the Democratic operatives unabashedly started peddling him with the ludicrous campaign rhyme: “Rumpsey, Dumpsey; Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh!”
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When the Democrats held a national convention in Baltimore on May 20, 1835, it was done so merely to ratify Jackson’s choice of Van Buren to run for president. Van Buren was unopposed, but the Virginians insisted on Rives as his running mate instead of the Jackson-anointed Johnson, splitting the convention. Tennessee had no delegates present, whereupon the Jackson–Van Buren forces drafted an unknown Tennessean named Edmund Rucker, who was visiting the convention, to cast the state’s fifteen votes needed to give Johnson the vice presidential nomination. Johnson was chosen on the first ballot.
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The rival Whigs held no national convention in 1836, instead using a combination of state legislative caucuses, conventions, and local meetings that resulted in multiple nominations by this yet-to-be-consolidated party. A Whig convention in Pennsylvania successfully put forward Johnson’s superior officer in the War of 1812, General William Henry Harrison, the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe. For vice president, the anti–Van Buren forces were offered a choice between to a former Democrat from Virginia, John Tyler, and an Anti-Mason from New York, Francis Granger. The multiplicity of candidates doomed the Whigs’ chances, who sought to win support on the basis of opposition to King Andrew’s handpicking of his heir.

In a way, Johnson’s political ambitions were a factor in Harrison’s decision to seek the presidency himself. The attention coming Johnson’s way in the political exploitation of Tecumseh’s death inspired western followers of Harrison to advertise his own military record as more deserving of the Jackson mantle than that of the man who had served under Harrison. Johnson’s boosters had been glorifying him at commemorative celebrations at the site of the battle, apparently to Harrison’s irritation. When the general was invited to attend one of the commemorations, he publicly
chastised Johnson for posing as the hero of the battle in which Harrison was the American commander. Harrison enthusiasts then began to generate a groundswell for a candidacy of his own.

In the fall campaign, Johnson became a Whig target as a “great amalgamator” who had “habitually and practically” demonstrated his personal commitment to “abolitionist principles in his own home.”
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Johnson proved to be poison to the ticket in the slave states, and even his home state of Kentucky went for Harrison and Granger. As a champion of the working man Johnson gained some labor support, especially as an aggressive congressional foe of imprisonment for nonpayment of debt. But the Democratic strategy was to deemphasize personality other than to cast Van Buren as the vehicle for continuing the Jacksonian era. It sought to shape the election as between one solid political party grounded in Jeffersonian principles and a disorganized and discontented collection of national bank diehards and other anti-Jackson critics. Johnson characterized the campaign of 1836 as “the great … and final battle against 35 millions of money, against nullification, against a scheme of protection and of its correlative, waste by internal improvements.”
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On Election Day, Van Buren won with only 50.9 percent of the popular vote to 49.1 percent for the Whig candidates combined, but his margin in the electoral college was much wider. In the vice presidential race, however, Johnson fell one vote short of a majority, Virginia champing over the snub to William Rives and withholding its twenty-three votes. Thus, the choice fell to the Senate, with the choice between the top finishers, Johnson and Granger. The states, each casting one vote along party lines, easily elected Johnson.

He embarked on the vice presidency with little prospect of playing any significant role in the administration of Van Buren. As a former vice president who had been heavily engaged in the Jackson administration, Van Buren might have been expected to involve the second officer in his own. But Johnson, for all his many years in Congress, was essentially devoid of administrative experience, and beyond that he was well aware that he had been a drag on the Democratic ticket. So he was reduced largely to his office’s only active responsibility, as president of the Senate, which he addressed with the humility of a newcomer to Capitol Hill, which he was not.
In taking the chair, Johnson told the senators what he was hoping for to offset his diffidence: “The intelligence of the Senate will guard the country from any injury that might result from the imperfections of the presiding officer.”
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