Fragile Freedom

When Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster was offered the Vice Presidency on the Whig ticket of 1840 he declared, “I do not propose to be buried until I am really dead.” It was, as the nation’s first Vice President, John Adams described, largely viewed as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” It was not an office often marred with controversy or struggle, at least not like the Presidency, whose elections had, more often than not, turned into brutal political blood sports. Then there was the man who became the only Vice President in history to be selected by the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment, as the Senate met on February 8th, 1837 to elect Richard Mentor Johnson as the 9th Vice President of the United State. The truth was that Colonel Johnson, Congressman from Kentucky, was not Martin Van Buren’s first choice. He wasn’t Van Buren’s choice at all He wanted Virginia Congressman William Cabell Rives, a man who had begun his career studying la