VAN BUREN AND THE TWO-THIRDS RULE.

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peared. They went to work industriously and skillfully to compass that end. It was not a light task. The force of New York, as has been so frequently and so signally demonstrated, is difficult to overcome in a Democratic National Convention; and New York was not only unanimously, but enthusiastically, for Mr. Van Buren. Hitherto New York and the South had been in alliance, and their joint decrees were the rule of action inside the Democratic party. They were now separated and hostile, and the trial of strength that ensued was one of the most interesting political contests ever witnessed in the country. The Democratic masses had so long followed Southern lead that they were bewildered by this new and unexpected development. From the organization of the Federal Government to that hour, a period of fifty-six years, Mr. Van Buren was the only Northern man whom the Democracy had supported for the Presidency; and Mr. Van Buren had been forced upon the party by General Jackson. His title to his political estate, therefore, came from the South. It remained strong because his supporters believed that Jackson was still behind him. One word from the great chief at the Hermitage would have compelled Mr. Van Buren to retire from the field. But the name of Jackson was powerful with the Democratic masses. Against all the deep plots laid for Van Buren's overthrow, he was still able, when the national convention assembled at Baltimore in May, 1844, to count a majority of the delegates in favor of his nomination.

The Texas treaty of annexation was still pending in the Senate with a decided majority committed against its confirmation, both upon public and partisan grounds. The Whig senators and the friends of Van Buren had coalesced for its defeat after their respective chiefs had pronounced against it. Mr. Crittenden of Kentucky and Colonel Benton were the leaders under whose joint efforts the work of Calhoun was to be set at naught. But, in fact, the work of Calhoun had already been effectually done and he could afford to disregard the fate of the treaty. He had consolidated the Democratic delegates from the slave-holding States against Mr. Van Buren, and the decree had gone forth for his political destruction. Mr. Van Buren, with the aid of the more populous North, had indeed secured a majority of the convention, but an instrumentality was at hand to overcome this apparent advantage. In the two preceding national conventions of the Democratic party, the rule requiring a two-thirds vote of all the delegates to make a nomination had been adopted at

the instance of Mr. Van Buren's friends in order to insure his victory. It was now to be used for his defeat. Foreseeing this result, the same zealous and devoted friends of Mr. Van Buren resisted its adoption. Romulus M. Sanders of North Carolina introduced the rule, and was sustained with great vigor by Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, and George W. Hopkins of Virginia. The leading opponents of the rule were Marcus Morton of Massachusetts, Nathan Clifford of Maine, and Daniel S. Dickinson of New York. The discussion was conducted by Southern men on one side, and by Northern men on the other, the first division of the kind in the Democratic party. Slavery was the ominous cause! The South triumphed and the rule was fastened upon the convention.

Immediately after this action Mr. Van Buren received a majority of the votes on the first ballot, and it was not unnaturally charged that many of those supporting him must have been insincere, inasmuch as they had the full right, until self-restrained by the twothirds rule, to declare him the nominee. But this conclusion does not necessarily follow. Mr. Van Buren had been nominated in the National Democratic Conventions of 1835 and 1839 with the twothirds rule in operation; and now to force his nomination for a third time by a mere slender majority was, in the judgment of wise and considerate party leaders among his own friends, a dangerous experiment. They instinctively feared to disregard a powerful and aggressive minority stubbornly demanding that Mr. Van Buren should be subjected to the same test which his friends had enforced in previous conventions. Their argument was not satisfactorily answered, the rule was adopted, and Mr. Van Buren's fate was sealed.

The Southern men who insisted upon the rule had the courage to use it. They had absolute control of more than one-third of the convention; and, whatever might come, they were determined that Mr. Van Buren should not be nominated. As the most effective mode of assailing his strength, they supported a Northern candidate against him, and gave a large vote for General Cass. This wrought the intended result. It demoralized the friends of Mr. Van Buren and prepared the way for a final concentration upon Mr. Polk, which from the first had been the secret design of the Southern managers. It was skillfully done, and was the direct result of the Texas policy which Mr. Calhoun had forced the Democratic party to adopt. To Mr. Van Buren it was a great blow, and some of his friends were indisposed to submit to a result which they considered unfair. For the

CALHOUN DEFEATS VAN BUREN.

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first time in the history of any convention, of either party, a candidate supported by a majority of the delegates failed to be nominated. The two-thirds rule, as Colonel Benton declared, had been originally framed, "not to thwart a majority, but to strengthen it." But it was remorselessly used to defeat the majority by men who intended, not only to force a Southern policy on the government, but to intrust that policy to the hands of a Southern President. The support of Cass was not sincere, but it served for the moment to embarrass the friends of Van Buren, to make the triumph of what Benton called the Texas conspiracy more easy and more sure, and in the end to lay up wrath against the day of wrath for General Cass himself. Calhoun's triumph was complete. Politically he had gained a great victory for the South. Personally he had inflicted upon Mr. Van Buren a most humiliating defeat, literally destroying him as a factor in the Democratic party, of which he had so long and so successfully been the leader.

The details of Mr. Van Buren's defeat are presented because of its large influence on the subsequent development of anti-slavery strength in the North. He was sacrificed because he was opposed to the immediate annexation of Texas. Had he taken ground in favor of annexation, he would in all probability have been nominated with a fair prospect of election; though the general judgment at the time was that Mr. Clay would have defeated him. The overthrow of Mr. Van Buren was a crisis in the history of the Democratic party, and implanted dissensions which rapidly ripened into disaster. The one leading feature, the forerunner of important political changes, was the division of delegates on the geographical line of North and South. Though receiving a clear majority of the entire convention on the first ballot, Mr. Van Buren had but nine. votes from the slave States; and these votes, singularly enough, came from the northern side of the line of the Missouri Compromise. This division in a Democratic National Convention was, in many of its relations and aspects, more significant than a similar division in the two Houses of Congress.

Though cruelly wronged by the convention, as many of his supporters thought, Mr. Van Buren did not himself show resentment, but effectively sustained his successful competitor. His confidential friend, Silas Wright, had refused to go on the ticket with Mr. Polk, and George M. Dallas was substituted by the quick and competent management of Mr. Robert J. Walker. The refusal of Mr. Wright

led the Whigs to hope for distraction in the ranks of the New-York Democracy; but that delusion was soon dispelled by Wright's acceptance of the nomination for governor, and his entrance into the canvass with unusual energy and spirit. It was widely believed that Jackson's great influence with Van Buren was actively exerted in aid of Polk's election. It would have cruelly embittered the few remaining days of the venerable ex-president to witness Clay's triumph, and Van Buren owed so much to Jackson that he could not be indifferent to Polk's success without showing ingratitude to the great benefactor who had made him his successor in the Executive chair. Motives of this kind evidently influenced Mr. Van Buren; for his course in after years showed how keenly he felt his defeat, and how unreconciled he was to the men chiefly engaged in compassing it. The cooler temperament which he inherited from his Dutch ancestry enabled him to bide his time more patiently than men of Scotch-Irish blood, like Calhoun; but subsequent events plainly showed that he was capable of nursing his anger, and of inflicting a revenge as significant and as fatal as that of which he had been made the victim, a revenge which would have been perfect in its gratification had it included Mr. Calhoun personally, as it did politically, with General Cass.

Mr. Clay's letter opposing the annexation of Texas, unlike the letter of Mr. Van Buren, brought its author strength and prestige in the section upon which he chiefly relied for support in the election. He was nominated with unbounded manifestations of enthusiasm at Baltimore, on the first of May, with no platform except a brief extract from one of his own letters embraced in a single resolution, and containing no reference whatever to the Texas question. His prospects were considered most brilliant, and his supporters throughout the Union were absolutely confident of his election. But the nomination of Mr. Polk, four weeks later, surprised and disquieted Mr. Clay. More quickly than his ardent and blinded advocates, he perceived the danger to himself which the candidacy of Mr. Polk inevitably involved; and he at once became restless and dissatisfied with the drift and tendency of the campaign. The convention which nominated Mr. Polk took bold ground for the immediate re-annexation of Texas and re-occupation of Oregon. This peculiar form of expression was used to indicate that Texas had already belonged to us under the Louisiana purchase, and that Oregon had been wholly ours prior to the treaty of joint occu

FATAL CHANGE IN MR. CLAY'S POSITION.

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pancy with Great Britain. It further declared, that our title to the whole of Oregon, up to 54° 40′ north latitude, was "clear and indisputable"; thus carrying our claim to the borders of the Russian possessions, and utterly denying and defying the pretension of Great Britain to the ownership of any territory bordering on the Pacific.

By this aggressive policy the Democratic party called forth the enthusiasm of the people, both North and South, in favor of territorial acquisition, - always popular with men of Anglo-Saxon blood, and appealing in an especial manner to the young, the brave, and the adventurous, in all sections of the country. Mr. Clay, a man of most generous and daring nature, suddenly discovered that he was on the timid side of all the prominent questions before the people, a position occupied by him for the first time. He had led public sentiment in urging the war of 1812 against Great Britain; had served with distinction in negotiating the Treaty of Peace at Ghent; had forced the country into an early recognition of the South-American republics at the risk of war with Spain; had fiercely attacked the Florida Treaty of 1819, for surrendering our rightful claim to Texas as part of the Louisiana purchase; and had, when secretary of State, held high ground on the Oregon question in his correspondence with the British Government. With this splendid record of fearless policy throughout his long public career, a defensive position, suddenly thrust upon him by circumstances which he had not foreseen, betrayed him into anger, and thence naturally into imprudence. All his expectations had been based upon a contest with Mr. Van Buren. The issues he anticipated were those of national bank, of protective tariff, of internal improvements, and the distribution of the proceeds from the sale of the public lands, on all of which he believed he would have the advantage before the people. The substitution of Mr. Polk changed the entire character of the contest, as the sagacious leaders of the Southern Democracy had foreseen. To extricate himself from the embarrassment into which he was thrown, Mr. Clay resorted to the dangerous experiment of modifying the position which he had so recently taken on the Texas question. Apparently underrating the hostility of the Northern Whigs to the scheme of annexation, he saw only the disadvantage in which the Southern Whigs were placed, especially in the Gulf region, and, in a less degree, in the northern tier of slaveholding States. Even in Kentucky-which had for years followed Mr. Clay with immense popular majorities-the contest grew ani