Martin Van Buren

President of the United States (1837–41)

• Born: December 5, 1782
• Birthplace: Kinderhook, New York
• Died: July 24, 1862
• Place of death: Kinderhook, New York

Van Buren played a central role in the development of the modern American party system and, as president of the United States, he kept the peace, eased sectional tensions over slavery, and formally separated the US Treasury from private banks.

Early Life

An early example of a self-made man, Martin Van Buren began his life in Kinderhook, a small village on the post road to New York City about twenty miles south of Albany. He was born into the family of Abraham and Hannah Van Buren, both of respectable if undistinguished Dutch stock, going back to early colonial days. After an apparently happy childhood, the young Van Buren ended formal schooling at fourteen and spent the next seven years in law offices, first at Kinderhook and then in New York.

Admitted to the bar in 1803, Van Buren began practice in his home village, soon moved to Hudson and, in 1816, settled in Albany, where he continued practice for twelve more years. Each move marked a new level of success in the law and could be measured by the growing respect of his fellows and by an income, derived largely from small clients, which laid the basis for an estate later estimated at $200,000. In 1807, he married a childhood playmate and distant cousin, Hannah Hoes, and fathered four sons—Abraham, John, Martin, and Smith Thompson—before Hannah’s death in 1819. There were later flirtations and rumors of a second marriage, but Van Buren remained a widower.

Politics as well as the law engaged the ambitious Van Buren and opened a career leading from the state senate in 1812 to the White House twenty-five years later. Time spent in his father’s tavern—a gathering place for Republicans in the exciting decade of the 1790s—had sparked his interest and had begun to draw out an uncommon aptitude that was to make him one of the first and best politicians in the nation’s history.

Foes ascribed Van Buren’s success to the arts of management and intrigue, calling him the Little Magician. Such epithets as “sly fox” and “noncommittalism” were also associated with his name. Friends, by contrast, appreciated his uncanny ability to “read men,” to fathom the motives of opponents and to conciliate the interests of followers. Moving into the political arena once dominated by upper-class gentlemen, Van Buren cultivated the needed qualities of prudence, compromise, and self-control. Elements of style also signaled the ambitions of a lower-class person in the period of transition to a more democratic society and found symbolic expression in the care that the young legal apprentice gave to his wardrobe. On borrowed funds, he replaced his simple Republican attire with the knee breeches, buckled shoes, and tricorn hat of his Federalist mentor. Along with fine clothes would come a taste for good wine, suavity of manners, and great conversational gifts.

Personal appearance enhanced Van Buren’s style and image. Crowned with curly hair of sandy red and graced with ease of movement, the young Van Buren commanded attention in spite of his thin and smallish five-foot, six-inch frame. In later years, he gained a large amount of weight and lost most of his hair, but thick sideburns of reddish gray framed an imposing brow. Lending further distinction to his countenance were big, blue, penetrating eyes and the ever-present trace of a smile, suggesting benign contentment to some and calculating guile to others. Here was a man, one bemused Virginia aristocrat observed, who might row to his object with muffled oars.

Life’s Work

Van Buren’s career in public office was a mix of personal ambition and a statesman’s sensitivity to the needs of a rapidly changing society. In 1812, he began an eight-year tenure in the state senate, and for four of those years he also held the office of attorney general. The first part of his senate service was distinguished by unswerving support of the War of 1812 at a time when Federalists voiced bitter opposition; by the end of the war he attracted national attention with his proposal for conscripting troops.

In 1817, Van Buren gave belated but indispensable support for digging the Erie Canal, a project closely linked to his political foe, DeWitt Clinton. At the same time, Van Buren opposed most applications for new bank charters, for he wished to moderate the forces of change that were transforming an agrarian society into one featuring manufacture, commerce, and the spirit of enterprise. He also played a central role in the state convention that made the old state constitution of 1777 more conformable to the new democratic age. More offices were opened to the elective principle, and the number of adult, white male voters was more than doubled.

It was also during his senate years that Van Buren and his associates developed a disciplined party organization along modern lines. Nurtured by spoils and animated with an ethic of loyalty to the will of the majority expressed in caucuses and conventions, the party apparatus reached out from Albany to all parts of the state. Techniques of mass appeal and a style of campaigning not unlike religious revivals generated excitement and drew the people into the political process. Although rank-and-file party workers were attracted to spoils, “new men” such as Van Buren saw the party as a means of access to the power of government once reserved for the elite. Through its democratic organization and appeal, Van Buren and his party were normally able to outmatch the old style of elite politics followed by Clinton and, by the mid-1820s, gained control of the state.

Supported by his party, Van Buren won election to the US Senate in 1821 and remained in that post for the next seven years. His reputation had preceded him to the Senate, where he soon enjoyed great influence and claimed the chair of the Judiciary Committee. A central concern was to revive the two-party system, which had ended, with the rapid decline of the Federalists, in the so-called Era of Good Feelings. Van Buren saw it as an era of bad feelings: political conflict did not cease but turned inward, shattering the unity of the Republican Party into personal and sectional factions.

The Missouri Controversy was one result; another was the disputed presidential election of 1824, resolved at last by the House of Representatives in favor of John Quincy Adams—a neo-Federalist in Van Buren’s eyes. Van Buren then assumed leadership of the opposition to the new administration with the object of reestablishing the political base of the old Republican Party that had reposed in Virginia and New York. To attract southern support, he spoke out for states’ rights against the idea of strong national government advocated by Adams. Working closely with others, he fashioned a North-South coalition behind Andrew Jackson in 1828, and he pictured the presidential contest with Adams as a rerun of the old battles between Republicans and Federalists. To aid the cause, Van Buren ran for governor of New York and, as he hoped, his election contributed to Jackson’s triumph. After three months at Albany, Van Buren resigned as governor and joined Jackson in Washington.

During Jackson’s presidency, from 1829 to 1837, Van Buren served in turn as secretary of state, minister to England, and vice president. At the State Department, he gained by treaty the long-standing goal of opening trade with the British West Indies. His tenure as minister in 1831–32 was cut short when political foes in the Senate refused to confirm his recess appointment. Happily for his career, however, the Senate action created a backlash of sentiment that enabled Jackson to choose him, through the party’s first national convention, as vice president for the second term.

In whatever position he held, Van Buren enjoyed great influence with Jackson. Except for the issue of internal improvements, he had little impact on the formulation of specific policies. His influence was of a more general kind—namely, that of helping shape Jackson’s perception of the presidency in party terms. All earlier presidents, no matter how partisan their actions, had identified with the eighteenth-century ideal of a “patriotic chief” above party. However, Jackson set a new pattern by acting both as a president of the party and a president of the whole country. With Jackson’s support, Van Buren received the party’s nomination for president, and thanks to the divided state of the Whig Party, he won the election of 1836.

During his own presidency, from 1837 to 1841, Van Buren addressed three key matters. First, as a party president, he worked to contain sectional tensions over slavery. He enlisted the support of northern Democrats to sustain the House “gag” on abolitionist petitions and to complete Jackson’s timetable for removing American Indians from the Old Southwest. In return for this support, he prevailed on southern Democrats to surrender for the time their desire for bringing slaveholding Texas into the Union. Second, Van Buren kept the peace with Great Britain.

The aid that many Americans gave to the rebels in Canada created great tensions, but Van Buren held firmly to the policy that citizens violating Canada’s neutrality could expect no protection from the government. An even greater crisis arose over the disputed boundary with New Brunswick, leading by early 1839 to an impending confrontation between British forces and the Maine state militia. With bipartisan support, the president restrained further movements by the militia and worked out a truce arrangement with the British minister in Washington. The treaty resolving the boundary dispute came in the following administration, but Van Buren rightly claimed a “peace with honor.”

At great political cost, finally, Van Buren pushed through Congress his central domestic measure for an independent treasury. As his basic response to the Panic of 1837, it would separate treasury operations from all private banks. Jackson had severed the connection with the national bank and deposited government revenues in selected state banks.

Unhappily, the government funds added to the momentum of other forces that, by 1835, generated a speculative mania and then the collapse two years later. Van Buren’s plan would have the treasury keep and disburse its own funds and use only specie or government paper, but no bank notes, in all its operations. The effect on the general currency of the country would be deflationary to some degree, yet the clear need of a depressed economy would seem to be for some degree of currency inflation. Although fully aware of this fact, Van Buren held to the view that, over the long term, a deflationary policy would assure a sound recovery and work against any future cycle of boom and bust. Whig foes, by contrast, skillfully exploited the short-term need for some form of currency inflation, rightly sensing its popularity in a nation increasingly committed to enterprise.

The Whigs also put their political house in order as they looked to the election of 1840. Ending their earlier divisions, they nominated a military hero of sorts, General William Henry Harrison, and conducted a “log cabin” campaign that utilized to the fullest extent those techniques of mass appeal that Democrats had developed earlier. As a result, Van Buren was soundly defeated in his bid for reelection.

Van Buren was never able to avenge his stunning defeat. Principled opposition to the issue of Texas annexation four years later denied him the party nomination, which went instead to James K. Polk. For a number of reasons—among them a sense of betrayal by his party and a genuine concern for its increasingly pro-southern tilt—he agreed to stand as the candidate of the Free-Soil Party in 1848 on a platform of opposing the spread of slavery. Within two years, however, he returned to his old party. Even though it remained strongly pro-southern throughout the 1850s, he still believed that its states’ rights doctrine and its appeal in both sections made it indispensable for preserving the Union. After the Civil War broke out, he supported President Abraham Lincoln, but before his death in July 1862, it was clear that the war was in the process of transforming the federative Union of states into a more consolidated nation.

Significance

Historians for the next half century generally tended to echo the epithets fashioned by Van Buren’s foes and to underrate the Little Magician’s contribution to the nation’s history. His idea of disciplined party organization, two-party competition, and a party presidency survived the Civil War and helped shape political life ever since. As president, he served the nation well by keeping peace with Great Britain at a time when war might have brought disaster to the young country. To his credit, some other depression president might have welcomed war as a diversion from domestic problems.

Van Buren also merits good marks for his courage and consistency on the issue of an independent treasury, for many expected him to follow a more popular course. His central measure also lasted a long time. Repealed by triumphant Whigs in 1841 and then restored by President Polk, the independent treasury measure remained in operation until the Federal Reserve System was established in 1912. It did not end the cycle of boom and bust—as the panics of 1857, 1873, and 1893 show—but it is doubtful if any other plan would have worked much better in a country so fully committed to free enterprise. Along with his modest but real acts of statesmanship, in sum, Van Buren should also be remembered as an authentic expression of the American Dream, a genuine example of the self-made man.

Bibliography

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