Martin Van Buren
Facts
* President from 1837 till 1841
* Born: On December 5, 1782 in Columbia, New
York
* Died: July 24, 1862 in New York
Martin Van Buren, (1782-1862), van byoor'[sch ]n, 8th PRESIDENT OF
THE UNITED STATES. Rising from a background of machine politics in
New York state, he gained national prominence as secretary of state
and then VICE PRESIDENT in the administration of Andrew JACKSON. As
Jackson's most trusted adviser, he figured in the nullification crisis
and the struggle over the Bank of the United States, and he emerged
as a champion of Jacksonian democracy. Elected to the presidency in
1836 as Jackson's protégé, Van Buren was at once beset
with economic woes arising from the Panic of 1837. Often belittled
as being merely an expedient politician, he nevertheless could defend
his principles with courage when put to the test. After he left office,
his resolute opposition to the annexation of Texas--growing out of
his natural antipathy to the extension of slavery and his fear of
a war with Mexico--probably deprived him of the Democratic nomination
in 1844.
Early Life
The son of Abraham Van Buren, a tavern keeper and truck farmer, and Maria Hoes Van Buren, the future president was born in Kinderhook, N.Y., on Dec. 5, 1782. Martin attended the village school and Kinderhook Academy. At the age of 14 he began to read law with a local attorney and was admitted to the bar when only 21. He developed a successful law practice in Kinderhook and became involved in local politics, finding his clients and followers in the small farmers and shopkeepers of the community, whose cause he defended against the large landowners.
In 1807, Van Buren married his sprightly distant cousin and former classmate Hannah Hoes, with whom he enjoyed almost 12 years of domestic happiness. Before her death in 1819, Hannah bore her husband four sons and saw him achieve a position of eminence in New York legal and political circles.
Van Buren's first political office was that of surrogate, which he held until election to the state senate in 1812. He went to Albany at a time when New York politics were characterized by a struggle for power between the two factions of the Democratic-Republican party: the followers of the ruthless and ambitious DeWitt Clinton, and the rival anti-Clinton crowd, known as the "Bucktails." Van Buren became the legislative leader of the Bucktails, whose support enabled him to win appointment as attorney general in 1816. He lost the office in 1819 after Clinton was elected governor and made a clean sweep of Bucktail officeholders.
Career in the Senate
Elected to the U.S. SENATE
in 1821, Van Buren later observed in his delightful Autobiography,"I
left Albany for Washington as completely broken down a politician
as my bitterest enemies could desire." This is something of an
exaggeration. He was the acknowledged boss of the Albany Regency,
something new in politics in 1820: a machine built up and maintained
through the spoils system, including the assessment of officeholders
for campaign purposes.
When he arrived in Washington, Van Buren had already acquired the
sobriquets that were to follow him the remainder of his life: "the
Little Magician" (he was five feet six) and "the Red Fox
of Kinderhook," as well as a reputation for "non-committalism."
Stories of his propensity for evasion and double-talk are legion,
and "Little Van" himself delighted in telling them. Yet
Van Buren maintained that this reputation was undeserved. In balance,
anyone who studies his career must conclude that he combined sheer
delight in political manipulation with a strain of idealism that led
him in later life to adhere stubbornly to principles in the face of
political disaster.
Van Buren's senatorial colleagues noted his plump and dapper figure, always elegantly dressed; his flaxen hair thinning on top; his imperturbable smiling affability; and his remarkable talent for management. Few of them dreamed that under his polished exterior he suffered a gnawing sense of inadequacy, for Van Buren felt that he had come to national politics insufficiently prepared. His creed remained the essence of Jeffersonian Antifederalism: a plain, economical government operating in a severely restricted sphere of activity.
In the fierce five-way struggle for the presidency in 1824, Van Buren became a leading supporter of the congressional favorite, William H. Crawford of Georgia. He managed the caucus that nominated Crawford and suffered a crushing blow when a paralytic stroke effectively eliminated his candidate from the race. Van Buren's own New York legislature cast the state's electoral vote for John Quincy ADAMS, and when the HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES gave Adams the presidency, it was the New York delegation that furnished him the necessary vote for a majority on the first ballot.
Reelected to the Senate in 1827, Van Buren became the leader of an anti-Adams coalition, and after boarding Andrew Jackson's bandwagon, he was instrumental in putting together the jangling coalition that carried Old Hickory to the presidency in 1828. Van Buren's own position in New York had been made easier by the sudden death of DeWitt Clinton, and in the 1828 campaign he ran successfully for the governorship on the Jackson ticket. But he resigned shortly after taking office to accept the post of secretary of state in Jackson's cabinet.
Secretary of State and Vice President
Within weeks of his arrival in Washington, Van Buren became the most influential of Jackson's advisers. These two remarkably dissimilar men complemented each other. To Van Buren, the old general was the morally complete man whose character embodied "strong sense, perfect purity, and unconquerable firmness." To Jackson, the New Yorker was "a true man in whom there is no guile." Van Buren took the greatest satisfaction that his relations, personal and political, with Jackson ("that noble old man") were "cordial and confidential."
Van Buren's role in hammering out the program and determining the strategy by which the ill-assorted Jackson coalition of 1828 became the disciplined, unified Democratic machine of 1832 was all important. The members of the "kitchen CABINET," as Jackson's intimate advisers were called, looked to Van Buren for guidance, and time and again they urged him to stiffen Jackson's backbone or to impress some policy on him.
In the party's steady drift leftward during these years, Van Buren experienced in national politics a natural extension of his career as champion of liberal policies in New York state. By 1832 the essence of the Jacksonian appeal was equality of opportunity for the common man as against the forces of privilege and monopoly. This was the rallying cry that crushed the Second Bank of the United States, an institution that to many Americans epitomized vested interests. The potency of this appeal, with its crusading overtones, was demonstrated in Jackson's smashing victory in 1832 and in Van Buren's election in 1836.
Van Buren's campaign to oust Vice President John C. CALHOUN as Jackson's heir apparent and substitute himself is a classic of political artistry. By the end of 1830, Calhoun and his followers had been proscribed, and the grim South Carolinian had gone over to the opposition. Despairing of relief from the administration, the Calhoun majority in the South Carolina legislature prepared to challenge the authority of the federal government by nullifying the hated tariff. In the nullification crisis that followed during the winter of 1832-1833, Van Buren led the Jacksonians into the nationalist camp of Daniel Webster, with Jackson proclaiming both nullification and secession unconstitutional.
But Van Buren moved quickly to avoid a direct collision between state and federal governments and to remove a festering grievance by working with Calhoun and Henry Clay to push the compromise tariff of 1833 through Congress. Calhoun was back in the Senate, having resigned as vice president after defeating Van Buren's appointment as minister to Britain by his deciding vote. Van Buren had resigned as secretary of state in April 1832 to allow Jackson to reorganize his cabinet and get rid of Calhoun supporters. Actually, by making a martyr out of Van Buren, Calhoun ensured him the vice-presidential nomination in 1832 at the first Democratic convention.
The herculean struggle over the Bank during Jackson's second administration caused Vice President Van Buren some concern. He feared that Jackson's removal of the government's deposits from the Bank before the expiration of its charter might produce a major schism in the party. But Jackson's instincts were sound. He crushed the Bank and retired from the presidency in 1837 with his popularity undiminished, after seeing his handpicked successor, Van Buren, elected.
President
By 1836 the Jacksonian opposition had coalesced into the new WHIG party, which used the strategy of putting several sectional candidates into the field in the hope of preventing Van Buren from securing the necessary electoral majority. The strategy failed, and Van Buren amassed 170 electoral votes to 73 for his nearest competitor, William Henry HARRISON. He also received a small popular plurality over his combined Whig opponents.
Recognizing his victory as a tribute to Jackson's popularity, President Van Buren announced in his inaugural address on March 4, 1837, that he intended to "tread in the footsteps of my illustrious predecessor." A further pledge of continuity was his retention of Jackson's cabinet, with the single exception of the secretary of war, his own law partner, Benjamin F. Butler, whom Van Buren replaced with Joel R. Poinsett of South Carolina. With his usual astuteness, the new president foresaw the rise of antislavery sentiment in the North as a potential threat to party and national unity. He assured the South that he would protect slavery in the states where it existed and announced his opposition to the abolition of the "peculiar institution" in the District of Columbia.
Economic issues, however, were to be the overriding preoccupation of Van Buren's administration. Within weeks of his inauguration the Panic of 1837 struck, with disastrous results for the national economy and the revenues of the federal government. Van Buren called a special session of Congress, but limited his recommendations to the establishment of an independent treasury system to divorce the government's funds from all banks and banking activities, and the issuance of $10 million in government bonds to relieve the government's pecuniary embarrassment.
Van Buren came under heavy fire from congressional Whigs for his failure to recommend aid to the business community. He was roundly denounced for heartless indifference to the distress of the people, and some Democrats joined in the attack. Nevertheless, in the face of Democratic defeats at the polls and defections from the party, he resolutely stuck to his course. He continued to press for an independent treasury and succeeded in getting it through Congress in 1840. His obstinacy in this politically hazardous policy hardly squares with the view that Van Buren was an unprincipled opportunist.
The Democrats approached the campaign of 1840 with their machine badly crippled by defections and factional strife. Astute Whig managers, hungry for victory, threw their nomination to the aged William Henry Harrison and demonstrated their ability to drum up enthusiasm for him in the hilarious and totally irrelevant "Log Cabin and Hard Cider" campaign that followed.
The Democrats met in Baltimore in the late spring of 1840 in an atmosphere of gloom and renominated Van Buren. Unable to counteract the Whig ballyhoo, they went down to overwhelming defeat in the ELECTORAL COLLEGE (234 to 60), although the popular vote was close--1,275,600 for Harrison to 1,130,000 for Van Buren. The election of 1840 is noteworthy as the first presidential contest in which fraudulent voting was practiced on a large scale.
Elder Statesman
From the moment of their defeat, the Democrats looked forward to a vindication of Van Buren in 1844. If their convention had been held at the end of 1843, as they originally had planned, his nomination would have been a certainty.
Van Buren went on a fence-mending Western tour in late 1842 and called on Henry Clay, who expected to be the Whig contender in 1844. At Ashland, Clay's Kentucky estate, the two made a gentlemen's agreement to take a particularly divisive issue--the admission of Texas to the Union--out of the 1844 campaign. Texas had been an independent republic since revolting from Mexico in 1836. Antislavery spokesmen denounced the Texas revolution as a gigantic plot to add more slave states to the Union.
Van Buren had declined to negotiate a treaty of annexation with Texas during his presidency on the ground that Mexico had not recognized the independence of its lost province, and so the Lone Star Republic had waited outside the door for almost a decade. But expansionist sentiment was on the rise in the South and West. President John TYLER of Virginia, who succeeded Harrison when the old general died a month after his inauguration, decided that annexation was popular and projected the Texas issue into national politics. Clay and Van Buren agreed, at Ashland, to take identical stands against immediate annexation, since the issue threatened to split both parties.
When Tyler presented a treaty of annexation to the Senate in the spring of 1844, the issue assumed new proportions. Despite mounting pressure, Van Buren refused to commit himself until April 27 when the Washington Globe carried the text of a letter he had sent to a Mississippi congressman. On that same day the National Intelligencer published a similar letter written by Clay. The burden of both these lengthy statements was opposition to the immediate annexation of Texas on grounds of expediency. The Senate rejected Tyler's treaty, and the Whig convention unanimously nominated Clay for the presidency.
Among Southern Democrats the repercussions of Van Buren's letter were violent. Jackson, who had publicly endorsed annexation, was thunderstruck and decided that Van Buren must give way to a nominee committed to annexation. Many Southern delegates repudiated pledges to vote for Van Buren.
When the Democratic convention met in Baltimore in May 1844, pro-Texas forces succeeded in imposing the two-thirds rule for the nomination. On the first ballot Van Buren had a simple majority, but his total fell on each successive tally. After seven fruitless ballots the convention adjourned. The next morning a stampede developed for Jackson's protégé, James K. POLK of Tennessee. On the ninth ballot Polk emerged as the first "dark horse" nominee in convention history.
After hours of florid tribute to Van Buren, the convention adopted a platform calling for the "reannexation of Texas" and "reoccupation of Oregon." Van Buren rallied behind the ticket, persuading his popular ally Silas Wright to run for the governorship of New York. Wright narrowly carried the state for Polk, giving him the election.
During the turbulent Polk administration (1845-1849), the vast Mexican cession was added to the Union, intensifying the sectional quarrel over the extension of slavery. New York Democrats split into factions: Van Buren's "Barnburners" and the "Hunkers," to whom Polk gave federal patronage. The Barnburners supported the Wilmot Proviso's nonextension-of-slavery principle and pledged its delegates to the national convention in 1848 to withhold support from any candidate who refused to endorse the proviso. When the convention attempted to exact a loyalty oath from the delegates, the Barnburners walked out. The subsequent nomination of Lewis Cass, a former governor of Michigan, further embittered Van Buren's supporters, who held Cass responsible for Van Buren's 1844 defeat.
At their own convention in Utica, N. Y., the Barnburners adopted the regular Democratic platform, to which they tacked on the Wilmot Proviso, and nominated Van Buren for the presidency, despite his reluctance. In August his nomination was ratified by a huge Free Soil convention in Buffalo. The regular Democrats were indignant at Van Buren's apostasy.
It was alleged that Van Buren was motivated by a desire for revenge. If so, he achieved it. In the 1848 election he received more votes (120,000) in New York than did Cass (114,000). The Whigs carried New York, and Zachary Taylor was elected. Afterward, Van Buren wrote to his old friend Thomas Hart Benton, exhorting him to seize the opportunity to reorganize the DEMOCRATIC PARTY on Free Soil lines.
After spending several years in Europe, Van Buren retired in 1855 to Lindenwald, his home in Kinderhook, where he died on July 24, 1862.
Van Buren's Autobiography (1920) is an apologia and must be read with caution, yet it is invaluable in understanding the man. He also wrote Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States, published posthumously in 1867.
(by James A. Beatson, New Mexico Highlands University)
For Further Reading
Curtis, James C., The Fox at Bay: Martin Van Buren and
the Presidency, 1837-1841 (Univ. Press of Ky. 1970)
Niven, John, Martin Van Buren: The Romantic Age of American Politics
(Oxford 1983)
Van Buren, Martin, The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren, ed. by John
Fitzpatrick, 2 vols. (1920; reprint, Da Capo 1973)
Wilson, Major L., The Presidency of Martin Van Buren (Univ. Press
of Kans. 1984)
Sources:
http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/ea/bios/08pvanb.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/mb8.html
http://www.ipl.org/div/potus
http://www.americanpresidents.org