A History of the American People

were Hickory parades, barbecues, and street-rallies. Kendall had the first campaign song, The Hunters of Kentucky,' written and set to music. It told of the great victory of 1815 and of 'Packenham [sic] and his Braggs'-how he and his men would rape the girls of New Orleans, the beautiful girls of every hue' from snowy white to sooty'-and of how Old Hickory had frustrated his dastardly plans and killed him. Jackson proved an ideal candidate, who knew exactly when to hold his tongue and when to give vent to a (usually simulated) rage. And he had the ideal second-in-command in Martin Van Buren, head of the Albany Regency, which ran New York State, a small, energetic, dandified figure, with his reddish-blond hair, snuff-colored coat, white trousers, lace-tipped orange cravat, broad-brimmed beaver-fur hat, yellow gloves, and morocco shoes. If Van Buren dressed like the young Disraeli, he had something Disraeli never possessed-a real, up-to-date political machine. Van Buren grew up in the New York of Aaron Burr and De Witt Clinton. New York politics were already very complex and rococo-outsiders confessed inability to understand them-but they were the very air the little man breathed. Burr had turned the old Jeffersonian patriotic club, the Society of Saint Tammany, where members came to drink, smoke, and sing in an old shed, into the nucleus of a Big City political organization. Clinton had invented thespoils system,'
whereby an incoming governor turned out all office holders and rewarded his supporters with
their jobs. New York was already politics on a huge scale-a man would hesitate between running
for governor and running for president. Van Buren's genius lay in uniting Tammany with the
spoils system, then using both to upstage first Burr, then Clinton, and rule the roost himself.
Van Buren was the first political bureaucrat. He came from the pure Dutch backwater of
Kinderhook in Albany County, where the Rip Van Winkle stories originated, but there was
nothing sleepy about him. His motto was: `Get the details right.' His Tammany men were called
Bucktails by their enemies, because of their rustic origins, but he taught them to be proud of their
name and to wear the symbol in their hats, just as the Democrats later flaunted their donkey.
Branching out from Tammany, he constructed an entire statewide system. His party newspapers
in Albany, and in New York City, proclaimed the party line and supplied printed handbills,
posters, and ballots for statewide distribution. The line was then repeated in the country
newspapers, of which Van Buren controlled fifty in 1827. The line was set by the party elite of
lawyers and placemen. Even by the 1820s, America, and especially New York, was a lawyers'
paradise. Frequent sessions in New York's complex court circuit system kept the lawyers
moving. Van Buren used them as a communications artery to towns and villages even in remote
parts of the state. Officeholders appointed by the governor's council were the basis for party
pressure groups everywhere. Van Buren's own views sprang from the nature of his organization.
The party identity must be clear. Loyalty to majority decisions taken in party councils must be
absolute. All measures had to be fully discussed and agreed, and personal interests subordinated
to party ones. Loyalty was rewarded and disloyalty punished without mercy.
When Van Buren's Bucktails took over the state in 1821, he conducted a massacre of major
officeholders at the council's very first meeting and thereafter combed through 6,000 lesser jobs
removing Clintonians, federalists, and unreliable Bucktails. Clinton, who had invented the spoils
system, let out a howl of rage. This kind of punishment-and-rewards system was the very
opposite of what the Founding Fathers had envisaged; but it was the future of American politics.
And Van Buren, like many American master-politicians since, was quite capable of combining
party ruthlessness with high-mindedness. He was a political schizophrenic, admitting he abused
power occasionally and vowing never to do it again (he did of course). He supported Clinton's
great project of the Erie Canal, because he thought it was in the interests of New York and