U.S. Senate Elects Richard Mentor Johnson Vice President

In February of 1837, the U.S. Senate did sometime it had never done before, and has never done since: it elected the Vice President of the United States. According to the 12th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, if no vice presidential candidate has a majority of the electoral votes, "then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice."

A funny thing happened on the way to the election of 1836. Presidential candidate Martin Van Buren, Democrat, received 170 of the 294 electoral votes, a clear majority and besting all of his Whig rivals. The Whigs hadn't had a national convention that year, and so state conventions nominated four separate candidates -- a recipe for losing.

Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky was on the ticket with Van Buren, mainly at the insistence of President Jackson, who perhaps thought Johnson would help win western votes. But not all of the electors liked Johnson, and only 147 voted for him, which was exactly half and thus one vote short of a majority. So the election was thrown into the Senate, where Johnson faced Whig Francis Granger of New York. Ultimately, Johnson prevailed in the Senate by a party-line vote of 33 to 16, and became the Ninth Vice President of the United States.

Why did Johnson face hostile electors? He had been in Congress for 30 years, both in the House and the Senate, but more importantly -- politically speaking -- he was a hero of the War of 1812, when he supposedly killed the Indian chief Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames in 1813. It isn't clear that Johnson actually killed Tecumseh, but he used the story to his advantage anyway.

Damning, at least in the eyes of many slaveholders, was Johnson's unconventional behavior regarding his slave Julia Chinn. "Johnson never married," notes his U.S. Senate biography. "Family tradition recounts that he ended an early romance, vowing revenge for his mother's interference, after Jemima Johnson pronounced his intended bride unworthy of the family. He later lived openly with Julia Chinn, a mulatto slave raised by his mother and inherited from his father, until her death from cholera in 1833. Johnson freely acknowledged the relationship, as well as the two daughters born to the union, and entrusted Julia with full authority over his business affairs during his absences from Blue Spring Farm.

"The choice [of Johnson as vice presidential nominee] provoked bitter dissention in Democratic ranks... Van Buren's ally Albert Balch had previously warned Jackson that "I do not think from what I hear daily that the nomination of Johnson for the Vice Presidency will be popular in any of the slave holding states except Ky. on account of his former domestic relations," and a Van Buren correspondent later predicted that "Col. Johnson's... weight would absolutely sink the whole party in Virginia." Tennessee Supreme Court Chief Justice John Catron warned Jackson that Johnson was "not only positively unpopular in Tennessee... but affirmatively odious."

Nevertheless, Van Buren became president and Johnson vice president, both serving from 1837 to 1841, but losing their re-election bid to William Henry Harrison and John Tyler in 1840. One of the stranger things Johnson did as vice president was to return to Kentucky in 1839 and run a tavern for a while. Then again, vice presidents have little to do and Johnson was in chronic need of money, so a business venture probably wasn't that strange. He also took up with another slave woman.

The Senate bio continues: "By the spring of 1839, Amos Kendall reported to Van Buren on the vice president's latest venture: a hotel and tavern at White Sulphur Spring, Kentucky. He enclosed a letter from a friend who had visited 'Col. Johnson's Watering establishment' and found the vice president 'happy in the inglorious pursuit of tavern keeping -- even giving his personal superintendence to the chicken and egg purchasing and water-melon selling department.'

"Kendall wrote with consternation that Johnson's companion, 'a young Delilah of about the complexion of Shakespears swarthy Othello,' was 'said to be his third wife; his second, which he sold for her infidelity, having been the sister of the present lady.' Although one of the most fashionable in Kentucky, Johnson's resort also formed a source of considerable embarrassment for the administration."

December 5, 1782:Martin Van Buren's Birthday

Today is the birthday of Martin Van Buren, Eighth President of the United States, and the first holder of that office to be born after the Declaration of Independence. The standard historical impression of Old Kinderhook's administration is that of an appendix to Andrew Jackson's, but his most enduring legacy -- one that extends to the present day and into the foreseeable future -- involves his efforts in fashioning the faction around Jackson into a viable, long-term organization: the Democratic party. Or to use a more 19th-century terminology, the National Democracy.

One writer, libertarian Jefferey Rogers Hummel, goes even further in his praise of Van Buren, in an essay called "Martin Van Buren: The Greatest American President":

"Van Buren was a lawyer-president who represented a new breed of professional politician. His opponents denounced him during his life for subtle intrigue, scheming pragmatism, and indecisive 'non committalism.' Those charges were reflected in such popular nicknames as the Little Magician, the Red Fox of Kinderhook, and the American Talleyrand. The ideologically compatible but personally acerbic John Randolph of Roanoke once observed that 'he rowed to his objective with muffled oars,' faulting him as 'an adroit, dapper, little managing man,' who 'can’t inspire respect.'

"Van Buren’s demeanor reinforced such impressions. Appearing shorter than his five feet and six inches, he was stout and balding by the time of his inauguration, his formerly red sideburns now grey and framing a large head with a prominent brow and calculating blue eyes. Always fashionably dressed, charmingly witty, and imperturbably amiable, Van Buren never let political differences master his emotions or cloud his social relations. He was not a daring, original intellect in the mold of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and his ability to draw out the views of others often masked his pious devotion to orthodox Jeffersonianism. Even sympathetic historians tend to slight Van Buren’s term in office as the 'third Jackson administration.' Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., concludes that, while president, 'Van Buren was weak in the very respect in which he might have been expected to excel — as a politician.' Except during the last year in office, his management was 'negligent and maladroit' and showed very little 'executive energy.'

"On the other hand, modern advocates of decentralization and states’ rights are often more taken with Van Buren’s better-known rival, Calhoun, and his doctrine of nullification. Van Buren admittedly would not go to the lengths of a John Randolph in sacrificing political success for ideological purity. Yet the New Yorker’s overall career displayed far more consistency in opposing government power at all levels than did the twisting, turning path of the swaggering opportunist from South Carolina. Van Buren was also better attuned to Old Republican antistatism than the irascible, impulsive, and militaristic Old Hickory as strikingly illustrated by Van Buren’s more conciliatory rejection of nullification in spite of bitter personal differences with Calhoun. Above all, in sharp contrast to his political mentor, Thomas Jefferson, the Little Magician managed to hew more closely to principle when he was in the White House than when he was not. Indeed, a close examination of Van Buren’s four years in office reveals that historians have grossly underrated his many remarkable accomplishments in the face of heavy odds. Those accomplishments, in my opinion, rank Martin Van Buren as the greatest president in American history."

It's also a good time to mention Van Buren's vice president, the largely forgotten Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky (right), a Congressman selected as a westerner to give geographic balance to the ticket in 1836. Richard Johnson remains the only vice president selected by the US Senate after no candidate for the office obtained a majority of electoral votes in the election -- Johnson was one short. Supposedly some of the electors objected to his relationship with Julia Chinn, a family slave that he openly treated as his wife.

July 24, 1862:Martin Van Buren Dies

DPD is taking a summer vacation for a couple of weeks, but promises to be back in time for one of the main dead presidential anniversaries in the whole calendar on August 8 and 9, which involves a certain disgraced president and his better-liked successor, both within living memory but who nevertheless have gone on to their rewards.

Today is the anniversary of President Martin Van Buren's death in 1862. Van Buren, master political organizer and successful New York politician, as well as Eighth Vice President and then Eighth President of the United States, might be an example of the Peter Principle: he had risen to the level of his incompetency, the presidency. Or perhaps he was just luckless enough to follow a popular president, Andrew Jackson, be at the helm during the Panic of 1837, and then face another popular candidate, William Henry Harrison, in the election of 1840, which van Buren lost.

In 1990, American Heritage magazine had this to say about why Van Buren lost the presidency 150 years earlier: "President Martin Van Buren was by all accounts a likable man, but his cultivated manners were not seen as virtuous by the voters who had elected Andrew Jackson before him. The Whig party decided to exploit Van Buren’s reputation as an aristocrat in the 1840 presidential election by reviving the log-cabin populism with which Jackson had beaten them 12 years earlier.

"On April 14, Whig congressman Charles Ogle of Pennsylvania addressed the House of Representatives on the subject of Van Buren’s White House. The President had asked Congress for $4,675 to renovate the Executive Mansion, and Ogle greeted the request with a three-day tirade in which he mercilessly vilified Martin Van Buren. The packed galleries laughed and cheered as the congressman described a plumed and perfumed dandy 'strutting by the hour before golden-framed mirrors, NINE FEET HIGH and FOUR FEET and a HALF WIDE,' in a 'PALACE as splendid as that of the Caesars, and as richly adorned as the proudest Asiatic mansion.' Van Buren was too vain to eat 'those old and unfashionable dishes, hog and hominy, fried meat and gravy, … [and] a mug of hard cider,' Ogle said. On the presidential table instead were gold utensils and 'Fanny Kemble Green finger cups,' into which the President dipped his 'pretty tapering soft, white lily fingers, after dining on fricandaus de veau and omlette souffle.'

The only response from the White House was a simple certification that 'no gold knives or forks or spoons of any description have been purchased for the President’s house since Mr. Van Buren became the Chief Magistrate of the Nation.' Ogle published his 'gold spoon oration' at his own expense, and copies that circulated throughout the country made him famous. Ogle had set the tone for the Whig campaign that was to propel Gen. William Henry Harrison, the 'hard-cider man' and war hero, to an overwhelming victory in November.

May 21, 1832:The First Democratic Party Convention

It isn't a page-turner, but Summary of the Proceedings of a Convention of Republican Delegates from the Several States in the Union, for the Purpose of Nominating a Candidate for the Office of Vice-President of the United States; Held at Baltimore, in the State of Maryland, May 1832 With an Address, to the Republicans of the State of New-York, Prepared by Their Delegates, in Compliance With the Recommendations of Said Convention does shed some light on the beginnings of national Democratic Party conventions.

These days, we're used to the quadrennial light-and-smoke show that nominates major party candidates for the presidency, but in the Age of Jackson it was a novelty. Previous candidates had been nominated by state caucuses, but the flaw in this approach was all too obvious in 1824, when the Democratic-Republican splintered into factions, with four candidates running against each other (there was no Federalist opposition by this time).

The Anti-Masonic Party held a national convention in 1831, and the next year the Democratic-Republicans did too, convening on May 21, 1832. Its purpose wasn't to select a presidential candidate, since the party already had one: President Jackson. Instead, the vice presidential nomination was up for grabs, and it went to the man who had done the most to organize the party nationally, Martin Van Buren.

As a curious aside, the Summary of the Proceedings notes that a delegation was sent to ask Charles Carroll of Carrollton to attend. At that moment in time, he was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. Carroll declined, citing ill health. (He died later that year.)