แ

102 VAN BUREn and the freEDOM. THE MOHAWK STOCK. LEWIS CASS.

worship rising luminaries, seemingly from habit-and the resolution in Van Buren's case, declared him to be one of the state's "brightest sons," whose pure republicanism, patriotism and public spirit caused the corporators to deeply deplore" the necessity which had called on them "to surrender" him to Andrew Jackson. Walter Bowne, the mayor who afterwards whined so piteously for a few bags of the public treasure from that " revered chief," said to the secretary elect, "you have had to encounter the persecution of enemies and the treachery of friends-but your uprightness, your WISDOM, and COURAGE, have borne you in triumph through every conflict. The same powerful intellect, untiring industry, and devoted patriotism, constituting at once your glory and your strength. During the whole of your career, not a single event has occurred to dim for one moment, the lustre of a reputation, which has been continually increasing in brightness." The mayor then presented "the freedom," in a golden box, and Van Buren delivered a suitable response about harmony, "liberality, moderation, justice and firmness," remarking, rather quaintly, WE ARE ALL EMBARKED IN THE SAME BOTTOM." After giving audiences to officeseekers, political schemers, holders of French claims, bankers, brokers, and blacklegs; arranging plans for the future with the party leaders; receiving judicious hints from the merchants; and very probably settling with some of his most interested partisans, how best to open the future campaign against the United States Bank, he departed for the south to begin that twelve years course of daring and successful intrigue which had scarcely closed when he landed at the battery, in the midst of storms, and tempests, leaving the fickle dame called Fortune with her new "favorite son," William Henry Harrison, who, like Nelson at Trafalgar, was soon to expire in the arms of victory.

Jackson's first cabinet [which soon gave place to Messrs. Livingston, McLane, Cass, Woodbury and Barry,] consisted of Messrs. Van Buren, Eaton, Ingham,

holders, who then sold out, and down went the shares to 117. Webb and Noah explain Cambreleng's course in this and other stock operations. He is a candidate in Suffolk for a seat in the state convention of next June. He was anxious to secure the extension of slavery to Missouri in 1819, and to Florida and Texas in 1846; and he reported from the Ways and Means, in Congress, December, 1826, that "the commerce of a confederacy, internal and external, should be wholly free.' Noah says of him, Oct. 24, 1834, "It is now more than 12 years since Cambreleng has been foisted upon this community, and we challenge any man to point out a single measure of his recommendation, calculated to benefit the country. Having no wife, no child, no domicile-no interest, nothing to attach him to the soil here, except some hypothecated Mohawk stock, and being very useful to Van Buren in more ways than one, he is to have a perpetual seat in Congress." If I could not state one particular of V. B.'s life, the characters he associates with would show very clearly what he is. Like Polk, with whom he is very intimate, Cambreleng is a native of North Carolina-old in years, very short made, and very stout-no great orator, but well acquainted with business and politics. Messrs. Webb and Noah, in the Courier and Enquirer of 10th September, 1832, say:

"It is well known here that Mr. [Elisha] Tibbitis and the little gentleman [Cambreleng] are stock speculators, whose hosti i y to the Bank of the United States is purely mercenary. They are opposed to a re-charter simply because they want a NEW Bank for the purpose of speculating upon new stock. For twelve years Canibre leng ha lived upon the democratic party * * * he was no sooner admitted into the money changing fi m of

Croswell, Olet & Co., than his ideas expanded. * * * * We admit that not an individual in the Sinte but Mr Cambreleng could have succeeded in raising the Mohawk and Hudson Rail Road Stock to 196. H man. aged that well, through the agency of the Albany firm-sold out at the nick of time-resigned his appointment, and ran off to Washington. His stock is now worth 113, having depreciated 8.3 per cent in less than a year.”

If Cambreleng believed that the U. S. Bank could not establish a branch in any state without a gross violation of the constitution, why did he accept a fee of $1000 from Biddle, for locating a branch at Buffalo? He voted against Jackson for President, in 1825, in Congress, and for Van Buren as governor at the Herkimer Convention of 1828.

LEWIS CASS was born at Exeter, N. H.-removed with his father and family to the state of Delaware, in or about the year 1795 or '6-remained several years there, and thence emigrated west to Marietta, Ohio, in 1799-studied law there, and began to practise in 1802. In 1806 he was elected to the Ohio legislature, and on the 11th of December introduced a bill to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, on account of Burr's conspiracy. Next year he was appointed United States Marshal, which office he held till 1813. The 3d Ohio Volunteers elected him

CASS, AS GOVERNOR, SENATOR, AND MICHIGAN NABOB.

103

Branch and Berrien ; of whom the three last named were warm friends of Calhoun. The President and Eaton were, at heart, opposed to Calhoun, and in the

their colonel, and with that regiment he joined General Hull and marched from Dayton to Detroit. Hull sent him across to Sandwich, with 280 men, and Lieut. Col. Miller, to see what the British were about, and afterwards crossed to Canada himself, but being old and the fire of youth all gone, if he ever had any, he soon retreated before a very inferior force, and surrendered Detroit. Cass was sent to Washington, where he gave Dr. Eustis, in September, an account of the campaign. My impression is, that he behaved well; but a militia colonel without a military education had not much chance to distinguish himself. It was great cruelty to the country not to shoot Hull, as sentenced. The example was much wanted in those days, and it was the fate he richly merited, by his bullying proclamations and base cowardice. Cass was appointed Governor of Michigan by Madison, in 1813. He held that office eighteen years, and, being considered more suitable for the purposes and policy of Van Buren and Jackson, than Berrien, Branch and Ingham, succeeded to the war departinent immediately after the blow up in the first cabinet. In 1836, Jackson sent him to represent his government at the court of Louis Philippe, where he remained till December, 1842, and has since been elected to the United States Senate from Michigan. In 1841, he was named as a candidate for the presidency. Ritchie was then rather friendly to him, and published in his Enquirer many letters in his favour. Heiss, now Ritchie's partner in the Union, but then of the Nashville Union, copied a long sketch of his [Cass's] life, "by request," as he took care to state. Cass was, and is, a favorite in Ohio, with what is called the conservative, "or pet banks for ever" party-and having made a few flourishes while in France about the tyranny of England, and all that, at captandum vulgus, he was set down by the war folks in the west as very favorable to another 18th of July, 1812, policy. In the senate he keeps up this free and independent' character, but, at 65 or 66 years of age, it is to be presumed that his fighting days are all over. His opposition to the quintuple treaty against slavery, and affected or real indignation at England's "determination to persevere in her plans of suppressing the slave trade, until slavery itself was extirpated from the world," affords the very best proof, that like the cold and calculating Van Buren, he was quite ready to barter New Hampshire and Ohio feelings for a phalanx of southern votes, and to exhibit in the presidential chair the revolting spectacle of a truckling New Englander, playing the hireling, as the attorney of a set of men whose notions of liberty are better realized in Texas as it is, than as it ought to be. Ritchie and his clique would have preferred Cass to Van Buren, but Polk was still better. The yoke over three millions of unlucky necks in North America was likely to be grasped the tightest by one who, with his ancestors, had always bought and sold our fellow creatures like cattle, and never even dreamt of the slightest amelioration of their hapless lot. How well Cass knew the south and the west! His tact was really admirable. How naturally he put on the guise of a horror-struck freeman, at the very idea of a mutual right to search for human cargoes of kidnapped Africans! What a blow to our liberties, should we suffer it! Van Buren, in his inaugural, vetoed in advance every effort to enforce the constitution in its purity in the District of Columbia. That was part of his bargain. No man in America would more cheerfully have offered or accepted just such terms as his were, than Lewis Cass.

His humanity to the Indians was on a par with his kindly feelings for the serfs. When the Supreme Court of the Union had decided that the Cherokees or Creeks were entitled to the independent and quiet possession of the lands of their fathers, which they justly claimed, Cass, like Van Buren and Butler, was for getting rid of them. He is a good writer, thanks to his Yankee education; (he was the schoolmate of Webster and Saltonstall;) and he filled the Globe for weeks with attacks on the humane doctrine of the Judges. Jackson's policy prevailed-the poor Indians were virtually banished-the nation was heavily taxed to pay for driving them west, far from the graves of their fathers-the Georgia slave-owners were conciliated, and Cass had his splendid reward in the French embassy, and became as supple and oily a courtier to the polite Bourbon as he had proved himself before to the passionate Tennessean.

General Cass is rich-very rich-and, like Van Buren, very fond of money. He made a fortune by monopolising, through his station, means, and superior credit, much of the lands close to and around Detroit, at an early day-kept a sort of land office, and sold them out in lots at immense profits, on bond and mortgage, gradually, as the city increased. When Wise, in Congress, had accused him of having got rich through government jobs, agencies and contracts, the GLOBE, Blair, in April, 1840, replied, that "General Cass, while Governor of the territory of Michigan, bought a tract of land on the verge of the then infant city of Detroit. The sudden and rapid growth of the city converted this FARM into city lots, which General Cass sold for an immense sum of money. His fortune consists in the BONDS AND MORTGAGES obtained on the public sale of real estate which he purchased in the early settlement of Michigan." How he manages with his wallet of "bonds and mortgages" I can only guess from the fact, as stated in the Albany Argus, that in December, 1843, the first ward of Detroit, in which he resides, sent three Van Buren men to the county convention there, the delegates in which

104 CASS, AS SECRETARY OF WAR, INDIAN AGENT, AND AMBASSADOR.

interest of Van Buren. I do not at all doubt that Van Buren's letter to Hoyt, page 216, truly describes his standing with General Jackson: "I have found

stood, 29 for Van Buren, and but 22 for Cass, of which the city sent a majority opposed to him. If this is so, his popularity among those who had had most dealings with him, was not very strong.

When he left Detroit for Washington, in June, 1831, he became, as Secretary of War, the official principal in settling the accounts of his five Indian Agencies, and of immense disbursements made by him for the U. S. government. He settled his own accounts; perhaps with the aid of some dependent auditor, and perhaps not. With Andrew Stevenson as Speaker, regulating the committees, and the gilded bait of a London mission placed ever before his eyes, congressional inquiry was but an imaginary check. Yet all may have been perfectly correct. Who can know anything to the contrary? As settled with, Cass was assuredly no defaulter. The Portland Advertiser remarks, that prior to the time of being Secretary of War, he was Governor of Michigan-then a territory-and superintendent of Indian affairs. Both offices were given by the general government, and both salary offices. The business of the Superintendent was with the Secretary of War. Coming from this office, therefore, to the War department, Governor Cass had the power to settle his own accounts with his own hands, and almost upon his own terms. He had been a contractor, receiver and disburser, and became debtor and creditor and examiner of his own accounts."

John Bell, Harrison's War Secretary, winds up his annual or other report with some very left-handed compliments to Indian Agents relative to their honesty, but names nobody. He was soon ousted.

In the matter of the U. S. Bank, Cass, in the cabinet, was assuredly no Duane. The president had no need to offer to compound with his tender conscience by an offer of the Russian mission.' Long after the bank was defunct, society ascertained through a letter to G. O. Whittemore, that Lewis Cass "had never seen in the constitution of the U. S. a sufficient grant of power" to establish a national bank. Of course he thought Madison very wrong indeed, when he signed the national bank charter in 1816, and also Crawford, Monroe, Calhoun, Clay, Van Buren and the Supreme Court, in defending the act, but, being Governor of Michigan, by Madison's appointment, just then, he was far too polite and civil to say so. So he was, but he always thought so. So he did. In Sept. 1834, in the Telegraph, General Green described Cass, as "FOR A BANK-for internal improvements-tariff so-so-a little anti-Supreme Courtfriend of the Indians, AND NO FRIEND."

General Cass's laws, when Governor of the territory of Michigan, were, some of them, as peculiar as the peculiar institution' of the south. The following enactment, if extended to justices of the peace here, would much delight many honest men who may have been so unfortunate as to break the commandinent number eight, as also their worships of the quorum, who would be sure of heavy fees, prompt pay, and no need to tax bills. Poor sinners, as usual, would be excluded from the benefits. No pay, no pardon !

"An Act for Pardoning Alexander Odion.-Be it enacted by the governor and judges of the territory of Michigan, that Alexander Odion, now imprisoned in the county gaol of the county of Wayne, upon a conviction for larceny, be pardoned and released from gaol upon condition that he pay to the Sheriff of the said county, the costs and expenses which have accrued from the time of his apprehension till his discharge. The same being adopted from the laws of one of the original states, to wit, the state of New York, as far as necessary and suitable to the circumstances of the territory of Michigan. Made, adopted and published at the city of Detroit, in the territory of Michigan, this 7th day of August in the year of our Lord, 1817. LEWIS CASS, Governor of the territory of Michigan."

(Signed)

A few months before General Harrison died, one would have thought that if the official newspaper of the Union at Washington was entitled to credit for veracity, he must have been one of the greatest of monsters, one of the worst of men. When he died, Cass, at Paris, delivered a very long oration to his memory, from which one would have judged that he must have been "one of the greatest and best" of men-all this, too, on personal knowledge.

When defeated in what some suppose to have been the great object of his wishes, by the decision in favour of Polk, Cass wrote to E. Worrell and others, that he was delighted with the choice the Baltimore Convention had made of such "firm, consistent, able, and honest" citizens as Messrs. Polk and Dallas, both of whom he knew intimately, and that "they would never disappoint the expectations of OUR party, nor of the country." Perhaps he really was delighted. He had written from Paris, 16 Aug. 1841, "My conviction is, that there is nothing in my present position, NOTHING IN MY PAST CAREER, which should lead to my selection for such a mark of confidence. My repugnance is great, ALMOST invincible." How sorry the friends of Peace must be! That is, in case Polk should set the world in a blaze. Mr. Richard Rush wrote Aaron Hobart, of Boston, Jan. 4, 1844, that, after an acquaintance of more than thirty years, he wanted General Cass to be elected, "Because to have a

CASS ANGLING FOR THE AMERICAN DIADEM.

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him," says he, "affectionate, confidential, and kind to the last degree; and am entirely satisfied that there is no degree of good feeling or confidence which he does not entertain for me."

The first measures of consequence in which Van Buren was engaged, appear to have been the preparation of suitable instructions relative to commerce, tariffs, navigation, and boundaries, and the adjustment of claims, for the guidance of the U. S. envoys and other agents in England, France, Mexico, Spain, &c.

In the prosecution of the U. S. claims on France, he seems to have persuaded Jackson to assume a tone of menace and defiance, very unlike indeed to his honied accents when addressing imperial England. The aggrandizement of those banks and mercantile concerns on which he placed dependence, as forming material for the construction of a step-ladder by which, in time, he might be elevated to the Presidency, was not forgotten; nor did he hesitate to intrigue for the destruction of the U. S. Bank, from the moment in which he saw Jackson

man like him President, would be the most likely means of keeping us OUT OF WAR, under menacing questions that hang over us." Methinks friend Rush would have left this because out of his catalogue, had he heard the gallant general's trumpet tongued notes in the capitol this session, all ending in 54° 40', for which, however, some wicked wags affirm that he don't care a rush. Brougham said of Cass's efforts to please the cotton growing states by opposing the anti-slavery treaty, "And he has done all this for what? For the sake of furthering his own electioneering interest in America, and helping himself to that seat the possession of which he envied Mr. Tyler-the seat of the first magistrate of that mighty republic. My lords (continued Brougham), I hope and trust, for the sake of America, of England, and of hu nanity and mankind at large, that the prosperity and happiness of that great people will be perpetuated for ever."

In his protest, Cass accused England of duplicity. Webster replied: "You will perceive that, in the opinion of this Government, cruising against slave dealers on the coast of Africa is not all that is necessary to be done, in order to put an end to the traffic. There are markets for slaves, or the unhappy natives of Africa would not be seized, chained, and carried over the ocean into slavery. These markets ought to be shut. And in the treaty, the high contracting parties have stipulated that they will unite in all becoming representations and remonstrances with any and all powers within whose dominions such markets are allowed to exist; and that they will urge the propriety and duty of closing such markets at once and for

Cass's efforts in France prevented the ratification, by that nation, of a mutual concession aty, by representing England as insincere, and desirous to enforce her old designs of imsment, searching for her seamen, &c. President Tyler approved highly of Cass's conduct. b, of the Courier and Enquirer, rarely misses a defence of Cass or of Marcy. He evilikes many of his brother editors of the Whig party much worse than he does the demoof Cass and Marcy. He and they are thorough-going friends of negro-slavery in its orst forms.

al Cass is the Secretary who issued orders to Gaines to invade Texas. Of course he these orders. Had it not been so, he could have resigned his place. He is by equal in ability of Clay and Calhoun, nor does he possess the excellent heart, the rs of Col. Johnson. Van Buren has less mental power than either Clay, Calhoun notwithstanding a life of intrigue and demagogueism, chance did the most for him. eferred Cass to Calhoun, and Calhoun preferred Polk to Cass. The new divisions rth and south, slave owner and freeman. Southern policy is to give to us northand to ensure our bondage to the spread of their system by dividing us, and rgaining with the Marcys, Walkers, and other cunning men who have popuberality. Calhoun was hot for Texas, but, as to Oregon, he urged us to be not differ from him. Had I voted in Nov. 1844, Polk would have had my e stood pledged to act with perfect equality to the foreign born and the native, lent, with our native bigots, the foreigner's avowed enemies, in his front be a slave class, and a master class, I shall not willingly forge my own orted Polk, however, which I did not, I would have been, as others are, his e intimate with Gov. Cass, tell me, that his manners are pleasing; that scholar; an amiable man; a good husband and father. He is a large a big head; and carries his political principles, like a country doctor's convenient, portable form. He played his card well in the game of 4-and, after Van Buren's election, there's no knowing what may Cass is, by trade, a politician, and has mind and great experience.

106

JACKSON, CALHOUN, AND THE SEMINOLE WAR.

in possession of substantial power. The President was speedily involved in a quarrel with the directors of the U. S. branch at Portsmouth, N. H., and the breach when made was easily widened.

The influence of the cabinet; its patronage; the means its members had of giving a direction to public opinion on certain important subjects; their views, connections, expectations, wishes; the majority of them desirous to see Calhoun the next President; Calhoun himself already at the head of the Senate as Vice President; with the Telegraph press and patronage of Congress in the hands of its indefatigable editor, General Duff Green, at his back; presented a state of things which neither Jackson nor Van Buren liked, so they resolved upon a dissolution of the cabinet, as the only plausible means of getting rid of Branch, Ingham, and Berrien. One pretext for a quarrel was found, in the fact that President Monroe, and his Secretary of War, Calhoun, had not been altogether satisfied with Jackson's mode of conducting the Seminole war,*—and this was

* WHAT ARE THE FACTS ON THE SEMINOLE QUESTION? They are these. Jackson was employed by Monroe, and his cabinet, which then consisted of Crawford, Adams, Calhoun, Wirt, and Crowninshield, to chastise certain Indian tribes or bands, whose home was in Florida, a possession of Spain. He disobeyed, or rather transcended his orders, and on the 19th of July, 1818, President Monroe wrote him privately, that when called into service against the Seminoles, "the views and intentions of the government were fully disclosed in respect to the operations in Florida. IN TRANSCENDING THE LIMIT PRESCRIBED BY THOSE ORDERS, you acted on your own responsibility." Mr. Monroe said, it was right to attack the Seminoles in Florida, for they had a sort of sovereignty there, "but an order by the government to attack a Spanish post would assume another character. IT WOULD AUTHORIZE WAR. CONGRESS ALONE POSSESS THAT POWER." Jackson had seized and held the posts or forts of Spain in time of peace. Hill had denounced him, so had Ritchie, and Noah. Coleman of the Post, Feb. 8, 1819, said, that "in spite of the votes which one branch of the legislature have passed, we shall continue to think that the conduct of General Jackson, in forcibly entering the Spanish territory, and seizing upon the civil authority; in decoying, by means of false colors, two Indian chiefs on board of an American vessel, and then hanging them at the yardarm, one of whom, too, had spared the life of an American captive, at the intercession of his daughters; and in hurrying to a violent and ignominious death, two prisoners, after quarter had been granted, can never be justified by any authority to be found in any civil or religious code." In the British cabinet it was seriously debated whether satisfaction or war ought not to be the alternative demanded for the hanging of Capt. Arbuthnot, who advised the English authorities that Jackson's war mission was occasioned by persons who were grasping after the lands of the Indians, and the southern planters desiring to seize and punish their black bondsmen for seeking that freedom in a Spanish colony which the land of liberty denied. Crawford, in one of his letters, mentioned that, about this time Jackson wrote to Monroe, and "gave it as his opinion that the Floridas ought to be taken by the United States." He (Jackson) added, "it might be a delicate matter for the Executive to decide; but the President [Monroe] had only to give a hint to some confidential member of Congress, say Johnny Ray, and he would take it, and take the responsibility upon himself." Was Senator Houston, Jackson's Johnny Ray, in the Texas affair? Was Senator Yulee, Polk's Johnny Ray, when he introduced a resolution recently to annex Cuba, after the highest officials in Illinois had met and advised that measure? Who are to be the Oregon and California Rays? That President is not very particular in the matter of sincerity who pledges himself to all Oregon before an election, offers to give up 15,000 square miles after it, declares to the American people that our title is clear and unquestionable to 54° 40', and then offers a compromise for latitude 49°.

To return to Monroe's letter to Jackson. He told him that his seizing the fortresses of Spain, might involve the Union in a war with that power, when British privateers would harass American commerce, and this country not have one European power on its side-and that such a state of things ought not to be lightly hazarded. He advised Jackson to amend his reasons-and in another private letter, dated Oct. 20, added, “I was sorry to find that you understood your instructions relative to operations in Florida DIFFERENTLY FROM WHAT WE INTENDED." Here he speaks for himself and his cabinet, especially for Calhoun, who was then at the head of the department of war, and had issued these instructions. Mr. Monroe bids the general write out his views, adding, "This will be answered, so as to explain ours, in a friendly manner, by Mr. Calhoun, WHO HAS VERY JUST AND LIBERAL SENTIMENTS ON THE SUBJECT. This will be necessary in the case of a call for papers by Congress, or may be. Thus we shall all stand on the ground of honor,