DeWitt Clinton

American politician

• Born: March 2, 1769
• Birthplace: Little Britain, New York
• Died: February 11, 1828
• Place of death: Albany, New York

Clinton controlled New York State for his faction of the Republican Party, advocating both social stability and an active role for government. He was an unsuccessful presidential candidate and fought the emerging power of Martin Van Buren. His best-known project was the Erie Canal, concrete and practical, like his approach to politics, and exemplifying a proper resolution of several types of problems in a growing nation.

Early Life

DeWitt Clinton was descended from English grandparents who had been transplanted to Ireland before immigrating to North America in 1729. In 1831, they settled in New York, where Clinton’s father, James, was born. James, married to Mary DeWitt, of Dutch ancestry, had been a major general in the revolution; his brigade had received the British colors at Yorktown. DeWitt was educated at the grammar school of the Reverend Mr. John Moffat and then studied for two years at the Kingston Academy, the best in the state. Two years later, in 1786, having emphasized courses in natural philosophy and mathematics, he was graduated from Columbia College at the head of his class. After studying law with Samuel Jones, Jr., he was admitted to the bar in 1790 but did not often practice; his legal training aided him in land transactions and in his growing involvement in politics.

Clinton’s uncle, George Clinton, was the first governor of New York and the creator of a powerful political machine; thus, Clinton was accustomed to a political environment. In the New York Journal in November, 1787, Clinton published a series of letters from “A Countryman,” opposing ratification of the proposed constitution; he attended sessions of the New York ratifying convention at Poughkeepsie and wrote a report from the Anti-federalist position. He became his uncle’s private secretary and shortly thereafter also secretary of the board of regents and of the board of fortification. While involved in politics early, he did not engage in politicking at the lower levels of party workers; this fact may explain his inability to deal with the mechanics and compromises of factional and party maneuvering.

Clinton was an impressive man, six feet tall and often referred to as “Magnus Apollo.” His high forehead, large square face and firm features, and dark eyes gave the impression of strength and determination. He married Maria Franklin, daughter of an important Quaker merchant, who brought him four thousand pounds and landed property, on February 13, 1796. They had ten children, of whom four sons and three daughters were still living when Maria Clinton died in 1818. At the time of his marriage, Clinton was not active in politics, as the Republicans had succumbed to the greater political strength of the Hamiltonians (Federalists); Governor George Clinton retired in 1795, and the Federalists elected John Jay to the office. Clinton would undoubtedly have become a scientist of note had not opportunity and environment joined to bring him back into politics. Defeated for the state assembly in 1796, he was elected in 1797, and in 1798 won a four-year term in the state senate.

In 1801, the assembly elected Clinton as one of the four senators who, with the governor, constituted the council of appointment. This body controlled nearly fifteen thousand civil and military appointments and was therefore deeply entwined with the complex politics of both state and nation, still in flux during the early constitutional period, and with a two-party system not yet fully developed. The policy and partisan balances of state and national governments were also still unclear, and the tensions between executives and legislatures stemming from revolutionary politics were institutionalized in the new constitution and exacerbated when different parties controlled the two branches.

With its large number of presidential electors, the state of New York was vital, under the influence of Aaron Burr, in the “Revolution of 1800,” which brought the Republicans to national power. State politics, however, were characterized by factions among the Republicans; Burr did not attempt to control the state, and the influential Livingston family, politically neglected by the Federalists, gave its support to the popular Clinton group. Clinton emerged as the state’s Republican political leader.

The relative powers of the governor and council had not been completely clarified in the 1777 constitution, and consequently a bitter argument developed, ending in an appointment stalemate. Clinton at that time was young, energetic, and ambitious; his integrity and self-confidence and his ability to attract political loyalty were major advantages, balancing his ineffectiveness in handling people and in developing compromises. He was not a political theorist, always preferring the concrete and the practical, but his ideas were clear concerning the proper approach of the victorious Republicans to the offices of government.

Opposing the Federalists’ exclusion of Republicans from office, Clinton maintained that Republicans must be appointed in order that appointive positions might correspond to the verdict of the elections. To accomplish this, it was necessary to remove Federalists from most if not all major offices and from a sufficient number of minor ones to equalize the parties. As a dominant council member, Clinton took the lead in removing most of the governor’s power over appointments and in implementing the appointment of Republicans. Rather than being the origin of the “spoils system,” as many historians have suggested, this policy was simply more active in accommodating the appointive positions rather closely to the elective ones under the new political conditions of a developing national two-party system (rather than the older one of personal and local factions within the state alone).

On February 19, 1802, Clinton was appointed to a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate. During the next two sessions, he opposed a Federalist proposal to seize New Orleans from Spain over the issue of the right of deposit and supported the proposed Twelfth Amendment. The Senate at this time tended to be overshadowed by the House, however, and Clinton’s personal and party interests were in New York. Late in 1803, Clinton resigned from the Senate to accept appointment (from Governor George Clinton and the council) as mayor of New York City. This was an important office, and its fifteen-thousand-dollar annual income was also welcome to Clinton, whose finances were frequently in disorder.

Life’s Work

For the remainder of his career, Clinton acted in the state, rather than in the national, political arena. From 1803 to 1815 (except for 1807-1808 and 1810-1811), he was mayor of New York. At the beginning of his political career, in the assembly, he had been concerned with sanitation laws, debt reform, abolition, and the encouragement of steam navigation and agriculture. As mayor, he organized the Public School Society and aided the New York Orphan Asylum and the New York Hospital. In 1806, he supported the removal of political disabilities from Roman Catholics. As required of a mayor, he attended fires, helped to calm mobs, and inspected markets and docks. With a $100,000 defense appropriation, he supervised construction of fortifications on Governor’s Island and elsewhere in the city. He took a firm stand against British impressment and blockade attempts off New York City. He supported a plan for city development and presided in the mayor’s court. During his tenure as mayor, he served also as state senator (1806-1811) and lieutenant governor (1811-1813).

Dominating New York politics, Clinton assured the nomination of Morgan Lewis as governor in 1804. Thereafter, the Burr wing lost power in the party and Clinton broke with the Livingstonians, succeeding in having his choice, Daniel D. Tompkins, elected governor. Although basically a Republican, Clinton not only often attracted the support of Federalists but also was frequently in opposition to the Virginia Dynasty and to New York’s Tammany Society. The Tammany “Martling-Men” or “Bucktails” viewed him as a political heretic and a cunning dealer in political offices and influence.

Federalist leaders in 1812 strongly favored Clinton as a presidential candidate, and the New York Republican legislature nominated him; his position on the War of 1812 was, however, equivocal. Had he received Pennsylvania’s twenty-five electoral votes, Clinton, rather than James Madison, would have been president. (Soon after the election, on December 22, 1812, Clinton’s father died.) Following his defeat, Clinton turned his energies to the development of “Clintonianism,” a political position rather than a party, opposed to party labels and organization, seeking a wide base of support in the state. Clintonian Republicans saw an intellectual and benevolent elite, opposing “Jacobinical” chance, factions, mobs, urban vice, and crime; yet they considered governmental power as derived from the people as a whole and to be used to meet their needs.

An urban politician, hoping to make New York a cultural center to rival Boston and Philadelphia, Clinton was sufficiently Jeffersonian to develop a strong rural bias in his programs; the canal project was designed to stimulate both commercial prosperity and a westward movement, thereby reducing poverty and violence and averting the development of an urban proletariat and demagoguery. Clinton was ambivalent about both urban centers and government itself; appealing to both Federalists and Republicans, operating outside the increasingly delimited national party boundaries, Clinton emphasized the work of private societies to accomplish the necessary expansion of knowledge and the provision of facilities for “the people” in general.

Clinton’s involvement in voluntary societies was by no means merely a personal and private activity but was closely associated with his political life. He belonged to several dozen societies, was active in most, and held offices in many. He was a member of several agricultural societies, the New York Bible Society, the American Bible Society, foreign and domestic scientific societies (natural history, geology, biology), the American Antiquarian Society, the Western Museum Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the New York Military Society, the New York Historical Society, and the Education Society of the Presbyterian Church.

Clinton was also a prominent Mason; in 1814, he was cofounder and president of the Literary and Philosophical Society, presenting a book-length paper on American natural history; in 1816, he was able to get one large building to gather all the cultural societies in New York under one roof. His defeat in 1812 reduced his political power; he lost renomination for lieutenant governor and in 1815 lost the mayoralty as well. However, he was rebuilding his support: His brother-in-law, Ambrose Spencer, was influential in President James Monroe’s administration, he continued to attract Federalist as well as Republican voters, and the canal project was very popular.

As early as 1810, Clinton had been one of the commissioners planning a state canal between the Hudson River and the Great Lakes. The War of 1812 delayed the project, but by 1816 Clinton was actively promoting it; he was on the commission responsible for planning the canals between the Hudson, Lake Erie, and Lake Champlain. When Governor Tompkins resigned in 1817 to become vice president, Clinton was nominated (by a state convention including both Federalists and Republicans) and won by a landslide over Tammany’s Peter B. Porter. Thereafter, however, President Monroe directed the majority of the federal patronage in New York not to the Clintonians but to their minority opposition, Martin Van Buren’s Tammany Bucktail faction.

Monroe’s encouragement of intraparty strife was intended to avert a successful bid by Clinton during the 1820 presidential election; Monroe also believed that Clinton’s associates in Congress were intensifying the Missouri crisis in order to reorganize national parties along sectional lines, a development that he considered a threat to the nation. Although Clinton won the gubernatorial election in 1820, the New York Republican Party schism was permanent: The Bucktails controlled the legislature and therefore the state patronage as well (through the council of appointment). At this point, Clinton attacked Monroe for having interfered in the state election process, a states’ rights stand that could evoke support from both parties. In order to affect the 1821 state constitutional convention, Clinton had to prove his charges, which he did by submitting bulky documents, in a green cover, to the assembly. His “Green Bag Message” set off a debate over the permissible extent of political activity on the part of federal officials.

The administration’s hostility having prevented him from consolidating his political position, Clinton decided not to seek a third gubernatorial term in 1822. Van Buren was therefore able to develop his control and establish the “Albany Regency,” which controlled New York State politics for a long time thereafter. (Tammany Hall was to benefit also from the flood of Irish voters resulting from the constitutional amendment Clinton had supported, eliminating the property requirement for voting.) The regency’s removal of Clinton from the canal commission in 1824 provoked a reaction which helped the “People’s” party elect him governor in November of that year. It was therefore as the state’s executive that he participated in the 1825 celebrations opening both the Erie and Champlain canals.

Clinton declined the post of minister to England offered to him by President John Quincy Adams. In 1827, an Ohio convention nominated him as a presidential candidate, but he would have had little chance: He had a states’ rights stand, there was a strong Anti-Masonic movement, and the issues of patronage and party organization continued to alienate support from the Clintonian group. On February 11, 1828, Clinton died suddenly. He was survived by his second wife, Catharine Jones, daughter of a New York physician, whom he had married on May 8, 1819; the New York legislature voted to appropriate ten thousand dollars for his minor children, as Clinton had left debts. His chief association in the public mind was with one of his most cherished projects, the great Erie Canal.

Significance

At the outset of his political career, DeWitt Clinton was associated with the great national political figures of the time, the young postrevolutionary leaders who were to dominate national politics until the Civil War. He was always to be involved in the complex and bitter partisanship of the early nineteenth century, pitting state, sectional, and national interests against one another, swirling in a confusion of intrastate and intraparty factions. In contrast to his political contemporaries such as James Monroe, John C. Calhoun, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Martin Van Buren, and Andrew Jackson, Clinton’s primary political service was to be in his state rather than at the national level. However, as a dominant politician in New York State, Clinton was necessarily a factor in national politics, and he shared the presidential aspirations of his colleagues: The electoral votes of only one state kept him from the presidency in 1812, and he remained a real political threat to the Virginia Dynasty.

As a politician, Clinton was a figure of ambiguities and contradictions. His preferences and policies placed him from time to time in all the varying political denominations; an elitist with a power base in one state only, he could never have developed a party organization around his own national leadership. He was never able in the mechanics of politics, and his personality, reserved and cold, did not attract supporters. Despite these shortcomings, he was usually admired and respected for his governmental abilities and positive programs. He supported states’ rights yet viewed government as the necessary agency for developing programs to ensure general prosperity, balance and order in society, and economic expansion and opportunities.

Clinton’s version of an earlier “country ideology” led him to numerous local agricultural societies, to the Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures, and to the canal project. At the same time, he was concerned with urban problems, advocating, for example, the inexpensive Lancasterian educational system and supporting the establishment of Emma Willard’s academy at Troy; from 1805 until his death, he was president of the New York Free School Society. His concept of the role of government frequently gained for him Federalist support, yet he had begun in politics as a Republican. Conflicts with the Virginia Dynasty and Tammany Hall meant that he could never control the Democratic Republican Party, despite his support of Jackson, yet to play a prominent part among the National Republicans, he would have had to cooperate with John Quincy Adams, whom he disliked. A patrician elite providing leadership for the independent yeomanry was an idea belonging more to the eighteenth century than to the nineteenth, but Clinton was somewhat ahead of his time in his concept of government as a meliorative agency in society.

Closely connected to Clinton’s emphasis on learned and benevolent societies was his own work in the sciences. In the undifferentiated field of early nineteenth century science, professionals and amateurs studied and worked over a wide range. Contemporaries (including the eminent scientists David Hosack, Samuel Latham Mitchill, and Constantine S. Rafinesque) considered Clinton a great naturalist, and he was responsible for the discovery of a type of American indigenous wheat and of the archaeological remains of prehistoric Indian tribes in New York. No theorist, he nevertheless agreed with the intellectual radicals of the day in accepting the concept of biological extinction as opposed to the consensus view of a static “chain of being.” He played a major role as a patron and promoter of science, primarily through the voluntary societies and whatever governmental aid he could provide, as in the establishment of the New York Institution for the Promotion of the Arts and Sciences.

Not a Renaissance man, not a scientific theorist, not the founder of a new political alliance, long a state governor but never president, Clinton enjoyed a fruitful career of public service. Less of a national figure in historical perspective than his fellow senators were to be, he has been less well known than they, to later times. The Erie Canal, one of his favorite projects, has enjoyed greater publicity than the man who helped to develop it in the context of wide programs for public improvement. Although Clinton may have taken a narrower view of public policies than his contemporaries, he nevertheless worked to acquire political support for his programs from a wide range of intrastate interests and areas, a political condition that, if operating at the national level, might have helped avert the increasing political polarization obvious even before the Missouri crisis. Although he died at a relatively young age, he had probably already accomplished nearly all that would have been possible for him in the social and political conditions of his time.

Bibliography

Bobbé, Dorothie De Bear. De Witt Clinton. New York: Minton, Balch, 1933. Reprint. Port Washington, N.Y.: I. J. Friedman, 1962. Written during the early 1930’s, this was the only full-length biography since James Renwick published his book during the early 1840’s. A rather uncritical admiration.

Cornog, Evan. The Birth of Empire: De Witt Clinton and the American Experience, 1769-1828. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Comprehensive and well-reviewed biography, emphasizing Clinton’s political accomplishments and how they impacted New York City and state.

Hanyan, Craig R. “De Witt Clinton and Partisanship: The Development of Clintonianism from 1811 to 1820.” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1972): 108-131. Clear analysis of the political developments and programs, and intraparty factionalism in the state. Based chiefly on primary sources.

Hanyan, Craig R., with Mary L. Hanyan. De Witt Clinton and the Rise of the People’s Men. Buffalo, N.Y.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. A detailed history of the “People’s” party in early nineteenth century New York, describing the party’s ideas and relationship to the emerging political culture.

Harris, Jonathan. “De Witt Clinton as Naturalist.” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 56, no. 4 (1972): 264-284. Examines Clinton as a scientist and concludes that his contributions were more as a promoter of science. Includes 1825 portrait of Clinton by George Catlin.

Hopkins, Vivian C. “The Empire State—DeWitt Clinton’s Laboratory.” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 59, no. 1 (1975): 6-44. Has a higher opinion of Clinton as a scientist than the opinion expressed in Harris’s article (see above).

McBain, Howard Lee. De Witt Clinton and the Origin of the Spoils System in New York. New York: Columbia University Press, 1907. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1967. Insightful study of developing party politics during the early national period and Clinton’s role in that development.

Nadler, Solomon. “The Green Bag: James Monroe and the Fall of DeWitt Clinton.” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 59, no. 3 (1975): 202-255. Good examination of national and state politics and issues of the 1810’s and 1820’s, and Clinton’s position on these issues.

Siry, Steven E. De Witt Clinton and the American Political Economy: Sectionalism, Politics, and Republican Ideology, 1787-1828. New York: P. Lang, 1990. Examines Clinton’s career, describing the “practical republicanism” that characterized his political philosophy.