Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 July 1896 — AMERICAN VICE PRESIDENTS. [ARTICLE]

AMERICAN VICE PRESIDENTS.

An 111-founded Prejudice Against an Office Which Has Been Held by Statesmen. The routine duties of the office of vice president are unimportant and the influence of a vice president in the administration of which he is a meml>er is insignificant. He has less to do with the course of than any of the members of the Senate over which he legally presides. In executive matters and in the consideration of appointments a president consults with his cabinet—never with the vice president. The president’s private secretary, indeed, outranks usually in point of influence and authority the vice president. and the latter personage has come to be regarded as an amiable figurehead, whose only real importance arises from the possibility of the president’s office becoming vacant. Yet some of the most important men in American history, especially in the early days of the republic, have held the office of vice president, and have brought to the discharge of its duties qualities of the very first importance. The first vice president of the United States, John Adams, was afterward president, and certainly no New England man was more prominent than Mr. Adams in support of the revolution. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, he was accredited as Minister to France in 1777 and as Minister to England in 1785, two of the most important offices which an American at that time could fill, and outranked only by the office held by George Washington, Mr. Adams’s predecessor as president, who was Commander-in-ehief of the American army. The second vice president of the United States was the illustrious Democratic statesman. Thomas Jefferson, whose participation in the events leading up to the Revolution was certainly more active and important than that of any of the members of the Senate over which he presided. George Clinton, who enjoyed the remarkable distinction of being Governor of New York for eighteen years consecutively (and the first Governor of New York, too), was the fourth vice president of the United States, and Daniel D. Tompkins, who was Governor of New York for ten years, was the sixth. It has been said often by critics of American political history that the most distinguished statesmen, HenryClay, Daniel Webster, and others of like prominence, have by some political fatality fallen short of the presi-, dency, and the name of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina has generally been included in this list. But Mr. Calhoun did not fall short of the vice presidency, for he succeeded in office Gov. Tompkins of New York, and was for eight years the vice president, having as his distinguished successor Martin Van Buren of New York. Mr. Van Buren was certainly the most prominent Democratic statesman in the period in which he lived, and after serving as vice president he was elected president in 1836, defeating William H. Harrison, grandfather of Mr. Cleveland’s predecessor. A careful and satisfactory performance of the duties of the vice president was, in the case of Mr. Van Buren, no bar to his subsequent promotion to the presidency, and later Millard Fillmore, elected vice president in 1848, became president, and in the presidential contest of 1856, though running on an outside ticket of a third party, Mr. Fillmore received 800,000 votes. In more recent years the office of vice president has been of less prominence, but It has been held with distinction by at least two New York Republicans—Chester A. Arthur and Levi ft Morton—the former afterward president and the latter a candidate for that office.