Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. II.djvu/43

 MARTIN VAN BUREN 23 of finance and politics he has left an outlined sketch of the only dramatic unity that can be found for his eventful career. Confessing in 1848 that he had gone further in concession to slavery than many of his friends at the north had approved, he satisfied himself with a formal protest against the repeal of the Missouri compromise, carried through congress while he was travelling in Europe, and against the policy of making the Dred Scott decision a rule of Demo cratic politics, though he thought the decision sound in point of technical law. With these reser vations, avowedly made in the interest of &quot;strict construction&quot; and of &quot;old-time Republicanism&quot; rather than of Free-soil or National reformation, he maintained his allegiance to the party with which his fame was identified, and which he was perhaps the more unwilling to leave because of the many sacrifices he had made in its service. The biog raphy of Van Buren has been written by William H. Holland (Hartford, 1835) ; Francis J. Grund (in German, 1835) ; William Emmons (Washing ton, 1835) ; David Crockett (Philadelphia, 1836) ; William L. Mackenzie (Boston, 1846) ; William Allen Butler (New York, 1862) ; and Edward M. Shepard (Boston, 1888). Mackenzie s book is compiled in part from surreptitious letters, shed ding a lurid light on the &quot;practical politics&quot; of the times. Butler s sketch was published immediately