1 1 Prelude G rief had leveled William Ogden as surely as if he had been struck by a bolt of lightning. It was as if his life had descended into perdition. It had been three years since his fiancée, Sarah North, died, but the pain was still as raw as the day he received the unexpected news. He had been away on a business trip, much like the trip that brought him here to the Hudson River valley. They had been friends since childhood, playing together in the muddy, rutted streets of Weed’s Bridge and Walton, and riding their horses through the meadows of spring and summer wildflowers along the banks of upstate New York’s Delaware River. As family and friends had always anticipated, the couple eventually set the date for their wedding for June 1829. Then, unexpectedly, fate took her from him. A sudden onset of pneumonia, he was told.1 Hollow meetings to discuss business or politics seemed so unimportant to him now; he couldn’t find a place for them in his mind, still so crowded with memories of Sarah and the future they had planned together. He must have known the grieving would eventually pass; he had felt the same sadness when his father died, but it had not immobilized him the way Sarah’s death did. Ogden willed his attention back to the other men sitting around him in the small, cramped room. His brother-in-law, Charles Butler, who had enticed him to come to the meeting, was there, along with Charles’s brother Benjamin; but Ogden had probably been surprised at the presence of the other man in the room. Vice President Martin Van Buren was certainly not an imposing man. At only five-feet, six-inches tall, he was trim, erect, and fastidiously dressed. One biographer aptly described him as “a smiling little gentleman, not much taller than the back of his chair, daintily clad and possessed of a wavy golden crowned head.”2 Matty, as his friends called him, had a reputation of being more politician than statesman. It had been said of him that he soared to the heights on borrowed wings, an indication that he was a master of adopting and adapting the Prelude 2 ideas of others. An Albany attorney and Benjamin Butler’s law partner, he had become Andrew Jackson’s chief supporter in the North, and “Old Hickory” had selected him as his running mate in the 1832 election. Whatever the vice president’s shortcomings may have been, William Ogden knew better than to take his fellow New Yorker lightly. Van Buren was the creator and still the spiritual leader of an organization known as the Albany Regency. It was an effective New York political machine—the nation’s first—that controlled the politics in the state and powerfully influenced it throughout the entire nation. His advocacy of New York’s right and responsibility to develop its own internal transportation improvements was well known. As a U.S. senator in 1825, he had introduced a resolution that declared, “Congress does not possess the power to make roads and canals within the respective states.”3 He extended that belief to the railroad industry when it began to emerge just a few years later. It was unusual for the vice president to be in New York during the summer of 1833, attending to what appeared to be a relatively minor provincial matter, when he should have been in Washington at the side of his president, Andrew Jackson, who was fomenting a nationwide crisis over his plan to withdraw all federal funds from the Second Bank of the United States. But Van Buren was nothing if not circumspect. Staying far away from the hearth when the hot coals were being poked just seemed like a wise practice to the consummate little politician. His biographer Holmes Alexander described the vice president’s sudden departure from Washington succinctly: “Seeing to what a pass the affair had come, Mr. Van Buren ordered out fast horses in an effort to escape. . . . the Vice President had plans for a protracted tour of upper New York, leaving no address behind.”4 Charles Butler surely must have explained Van Buren’s presence to Ogden. The vice president had plans to meet his good friend Washington Irving so the two could ramble through the old Dutch villages of the Hudson River valley together; so he was conveniently in the neighborhood. More to the...