Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 95.djvu/233

Rh Blair and Benton a certain isolation in national affairs during the years that followed. He kept up with Blair a desultory intercourse over passing politics; and both together soothed the dying Benton and Clay, their fellow veterans. Donelson remained bitter against Jackson’s former friend as a “deserter” on the Texan annexation. Yet Van Buren, in his calm leisure and retirement, did not keep up his new Free-Soil connections, nor did he, like Blair, join the Republican movement which was organized after the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He collected facts and made notes for a review of his past career, touching lightly on things present. Autobiography became his cherished hobby. He dreaded geographical parties and sectional issues. Resolutions which he personally drew up for the Democratic convention of his state in 1860 were not used, because ill adapted to the disposition of that body. Van Buren’s ruling idea, the next momentous winter, seems to have been, so far as he expressed himself outwardly, that, as the slave and non-slaveholding states so greatly differed, a division of the whole territory of the Union on the Crittenden basis was desirable; or, if that proved futile, to permit the Southern states to withdraw in peace. But he stood by the government when the crisis of collision came in 1861, and declined the proposal made by Franklin Pierce, that a meeting of the ex-Presidents should be held to consider the alarming condition of the country and make a united appeal.

“The great fault of the American people,” observed an intimate friend of Van Buren’s, soon after the latter’s death, “is to represent him as a politician, when he was rather a patriot; though at the same time he took pleasure and pride in the means by which he carried out his measures.”

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