office. Town bargained with town, county with county, district with
district. In place of the system of control by the established
classes, New York's democracy was learning to elaborate the
machinery of nomination by the people; but in the process there was
developed a race of managing politicians, and the campaigns tended
to become struggles between personal elements for power rather than
contests on political issues.

The finished product of New York politics is shown in Van Buren, the
devotee of "regularity" in party and the adroit manager of its
machinery. Shrewdness, tact, and self-reliant judgment, urbane good-
humor, mingled with a suspicious and half-cynical expression, were
written on his face. "Little Van" was an affable, firm, and crafty
politician. Although he was not a creative statesman, neither was he
a mere schemer. He had definite ideas, if not convictions, of the
proper lines of policy, and was able to state them with incisive and
forcible argument when occasion demanded. To him, perhaps, more than
to any other of the politicians, fell the task of organizing the
campaign of Crawford, and afterwards of making the political
combinations that brought in the reign of Andrew Jackson. He was the
leader of that element of New York politics known as the Bucktails,
from the emblem worn by the Tammany Society. Clinton, his opponent,
exercised an influence somewhat akin to the Livingstons, the
Schuylers, the Van Rensselaers, and the other great family leaders
in the baronial days of New York politics. Brusque, arrogant, and
ambitious, he combined the petty enmities of a domineering
politician with flashes of statesman-like insight, and he crushed
his way to success by an exterminating warfare against his enemies.
Around him gathered a personal following embracing one wing of the
Republicans, aided by a large fraction of the old Federal party. For