unflagging diligence...............

 

     Making votes was one example of how corruption evolved—one could even say became democratized—in post-Revolutionary New York.  Given that land was no longer the sole path to wealth, politics became another pipeline.  Elites funded newspapers that promoted their interests.  They bribed legislators in exchange for votes on banks, turnpikes, and chartered corporations.  Van Buren saw this "implied alliance" between monied interests and the state as a means of restoring colonial-era oligarchy under a different guise.  Columbia's "money power" was, he believed, the essence of Federalism, whose raison d'etre was to "combat the democratic spirit of the country . . . an object which it has pursued with unflagging diligence."

-James M. Bradley,  Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician