A president takes control at a time when the national economy is imploding, and will find his ambitions for the remainder of his term thwarted by a devastating long-term depression. He is saddled with a perceived obligation to carry out the grotesque violations of human rights begun by his predecessor. His own party is divided, and a recently-galvanized opposition had formed around ideas no grander than the destruction of everything for which he stands.
2010? Hardly.
Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we'll look at the pre-presidential political life of Martin Van Buren – a brilliant lawyer and organizer who rose through the ranks with smiles and grace, only to be dealt a real crappy hand and shouldered with a pretty lousy historical legacy. I'm not saying 1837 is a whole lot like the present day, but then again...
Historiorant: This was supposed to be a one-diary look at the presidency of Martin Van Buren, but alas, so many things needed explanation that it's wound up a two-part biography – curse you, context! Part Two should be along next week. – u.m.
Though he was the first future president to actually be born an American citizen (the first seven had all been born before the United States was Declarationed into existence), it's doubtful that's where young Martin's father thought the boy would end up. The elder Van Buren ran a pub and farm in the town of Kinderhook, New York, as well as a household so Dutch that that was the language Martin spoke as a boy – making him the only president we've had for whom English was a second language, and the only one with a pronounced foreign accent when speaking (depending on how you view JFK).
His family was about as old-school as it gets – his great-great-great-great-grandfather Cornelius had staked his claim along the Hudson in 1631 – but it was large and of modest means by the time Martin entered the scene in 1782. His was not the life of the patroonship Dutch, but he learned a great deal about politics while working in his father's pub, which was strategically situated on the road from New York to Albany and a favorite haunt of politicians making the journey between the two cities.
The pol-talk must have been lively: New York after the Revolution was a stronghold of the Federalists, while Abraham Van Buren was a die-hard Democratic-Republican. Seeing dad hold his limited-government own against people who favored an oligarchy made an impression on young Martin, and he would go on to become a D-R himself. His formal studies ended before he turned 14, when family connections secured him an apprenticeship at a prominent local Federalist attorney's practice. He spent six years learning the law trade in Kinderhook, then moved to the City for a final year of apprenticing under Democratic-Republican John Van Ness, a lieutenant of Aaron Burr for whom Van Buren had politicked at a party convention in 1799, at the age of 17.
Weird Historical Sidenote: Support for Jefferson's first Vice President ran deep in the Van Ness family – John brother, William Peter, was such a Burrhead that he served as second at The Duel.
Van Buren was a tepid Burr supporter, but he was still pretty young during Jefferson's first administration (1801-1805) and the infamous descent into former-Vice Presidential violence which followed. Since his focus was then more on state, rather than national, politics, he wasn't caught up in the whole Hamilton Duel thing, and was able to move himself over to the Clinton faction of the Democratic-Republicans without too much fallout. His time as a Clintonian, however, would not last all that long.
Little Magician of the Bucktails
The power-brokering Clinton of that era was named De Witt, and he was the powerful and visionary mayor of the City, then governor of the State, of New York. It was he who early on got behind the idea of a canal across upstate New York that would connect Lake Erie with the Hudson River, and thus the Midwest with the Atlantic. For his part, Van Buren couldn't bring his Jeffersonian self to support a public works project of such vast expense that even his party's founder, leader, and president found "a splendid project, and may be executed a century hence." In an age when pissing somebody off in a strategy meeting often resulted in the formation of a political party, Van Buren just couldn't abide the Clintonians any longer.
He did eventually come around on the Canal, though, and worked to secure financing for it after Canal Commission member DeWitt Clinton was elected governor in 1817. This was pretty typical of Van Buren – his demeanor is uniformly described in positive terms, and the word "shrewd" comes up a lot. At 5'6" and with a slight build (until he got older, when he tended toward corpulence), he earned the nickname "Little Magician" for his ability to organize political activism and to skillfully maneuver in the Balkanized world of New York politics. Once the permission to start construction of the Erie Canal was a done deal, for example, Van Buren found it in his best interest to see it completed and to have his name associated with a winning project, rather than to nail his small-r republican colors to the mast and go down fighting the inevitable. In modern terms, we'd call him anything from a pragmatic compromiser to an opportunistic climber, but one thing's clear – Martin Van Buren was very good at picking his battles:
He learned to hold his counsel as others debated the hotly contested issues of the day, carefully observing the course of a debate and weighing all of the issues before staking out a position of his own. "Even after deciding on a course of action," one scholar has observed, "Van Buren might move with an air of evasiveness." Circumspect to a fault, he "enjoyed a name for noncommittalism that survived when most other things about him were forgotten."
senate.gov
Nonetheless, he – and to a much greater degree, the people he was hanging out with – remained implacable political enemies of Governor Clinton. They were all Democratic-Republicans, but they were bitter rivals, often running separate tickets on the same ballot after 1819. Van Buren's faction, the Bucktails (so named for the animal tails they wore on their hats like a teabag), were the allies of the Tammany Society (they didn't move into the Hall until 1830), which even in the pre-Boss Tweed era was exerting tremendous influence on New York politics. They were also dedicated haters of DeWitt Clinton, whom they saw as a closet Federalist. They might have had a point: Clinton had run as the Federalist (and anti-war of 1812 faction of the D-Rs) against James Madison, and there was no denying that the Erie Canal was big, expensive, centralized, and all in all very un-Jeffersonian yeoman-farmer republican.
Van Buren was gaining power and authority as he climbed, first to State Senator (he voted against a resolution favoring admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1820) and Attorney General, then presidential Elector, and finally, in 1821, to US Senator. He was a member of the Bucktail's controlling inner circle, known as the "Albany Regency," and through it, he developed the "spoils system" to a high degree. He made enemies, sure, but he was also instrumental in building the foundations of the Second Party System, and in no small way, the Democratic Party itself, since the Bucktails morphed into the Jacksonians, who themselves usurped the antebellum Democrats.
The National Scene
Van Buren was elected Senator from New York in 1821 as the Bucktail D-R candidate – to continue with the random Clinton connections, Hilary would later serve in the same Class 1 seat – and continued to show his characteristic shrewdness after his arrival in Washington. At first, he favored the internal improvements called for by the developing American System, and in 1824 even supported a constitutional amendment to permit their funding. The next year, however, found him flip-flopping on federal aid for internal improvements. Similarly, though he voted for the protectionist Tariff of 1824, he gradually abandoned the protectionist position, finally arriving at a "tariff for revenue only."
He kept himself out of the mess that was the Election of 1824, but was unable to convince New York's Congressional delegation to vote against John Quincy Adams – the issue was decided when fellow New Yorker Stephen Van Rensselaer (the 10th wealthiest American of all time, incidentally, as measured by total wealth as a fraction of the contemporary U.S. GDP)), cast the deciding vote against Andrew Jackson. It was during these proceedings that Van Buren first noticed the national-candidacy potential of the Hero of New Orleans.
Like many Jeffersonians, Van Buren was a fan of Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford of Georgia, and had supported Crawford's candidacy for president in 1824 (and garnering Georgia's electoral vote for VP that year as a result). After Crawford suffered a stroke in 1823 and electoral loss in 1824, he returned to Georgia and took up the robes of a superior court judge, which left his supporters without a support-ee. Van Buren was instrumental in moving his core of Crawford supporters to Andrew Jackson, who was already out in the West (then considered Tennessee and Kentucky) telling anyone who would listen about he'd been screwed in the "Corrupt Bargain" and making noises about running again in 1828.
Once he'd sidled up to Jackson, Van Buren began to organize the party electoral process into something we modern types would recognize. Determined to unify "the old Republican party" around Old Hickory, he developed a top-down model in which state committee chairs organized volunteers and activities at the local level, newspapers printed one-sided assessments of the candidate's qualifications (Jackson was presented as humble and pious), and "Hurra Boys" planted hickory trees and handed out sticks of hickory for waving at pro-Jackson rallies.
In the meantime, Van Buren skillfully navigated the contentious swamp of Washington politics. Though the Election of '24 had caused a lot of partisan bad feelings, Van Buren was notable for not being a grudge-holder, and he voted in favor of seating Henry Clay as John Quincy Adams' Secretary of State despite his developing support for Jackson. During JQA's term, however, he opposed the president's plan for internal improvements, as well as US participation in the Panama Congress that Simon Bolivar was putting together.
Interesting Historical Parallel: The above link on the Panama Congress starts with an interesting line, especially in light of the problems faced by our current President:
Some of what historians have called Adams' blunders were blunders only in a manner of speaking; that is, they were proposals or policies that failed and even hurt him politically not because of their lack of merit but because his congressional opponents artfully and effectively made them objects of ridicule.
While in the Senate, Van Buren rose to leadership through his position as chair of the Judiciary Committee and developed a close working relationship with Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Benton, one of the more colorful characters in an era full of colorful characters, was another lieutenant of Jackson's (he was originally from Tennessee) who would go on to be a supporter of Van Buren, enemy of John C. Calhoun, and participant in all the great sectional and manifest destiny discourse of the 1830s and 40s, before being run out of Missouri politics in the 1850s for (among other "anti-Southern" things) opposing the repeal of the Compromise of 1820.
Life in the Realm of King Andrew
Van Buren went on a speaking tour of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia in 1827, talking Crawford supporters into the Jacksonian camp. He returned to New York in time to win the governor's race in 1828 (DeWitt Clinton had died unexpectedly while still in office), and went on to serve the shortest term in the state's history – just after the presidential inauguration, Jackson made Van Buren his Secretary of State (there's that Clinton thing again...).
No great foreign crises threatened the US during Jackson's first term (1829-1833); the big fights were all over domestic and partisan issues, and they were indeed getting big. Jackson's Vice President, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, stood against his own president on several critical issues, most notably on tariff and whether or not a state had the right to "nullify" federal laws it considered injurious. As things grew increasingly acrimonious between the two men, Van Buren chose to side with Jackson, and so became heir apparent to replace Calhoun as vice president on the 1832 ticket.
It also didn't hurt that Van Buren had been courteous toward Peggy Eaton, socially ostracized wife of Jackson's Secretary of War. Jackson had a particular sensitivity to attacks on the wives of politicians – his own wife had died during the interregnum between his election and inauguration, and he blamed it on the attacks of Adams supporters during the campaign. He never did forgive them, and since Calhoun's wife Floride was one of the leaders of the freeze-out-Peggy crowd, Van Buren appeared all the more chivalrous in the president's eye. Van Buren's own wife had died of tuberculosis in 1819 and was survived by four sons; he never remarried.
The Eaton Affair – and more specifically, John and Floride Calhoun's enmity towards Martin Van Buren over it – led to Jackson's entire Cabinet resigning and/or getting "reorganized" over a period of a few weeks in the spring of 1831. In Van Buren's case, Jackson kept his chosen successor on as a member of his informal "Kitchen Cabinet" of backroom advisors, and later moved to protect him by making him ambassador to Great Britain and sending him off before the Senate had approved his nomination. Van Buren had been in London only a few months when he received news that Calhoun had orchestrated his rejection in the Senate (the Vice President himself cast the final, tie-breaking vote), and that he would not be America's ambassador, after all. That was in February, 1832; after a quick look around the continent – a vacation with political overtones, since Van Buren feared his enemies would coalesce if he returned too quickly, and hoped their coalition would fall apart if he dawdled a bit – he made his way back to the States, arriving in July.
Weird Historical Parallel: It's hardly WikiLeaks, but a series of document-based scandals did have an impact on Van Buren's career during the first Jackson Administration. One of the pieces of evidence that surfaced which convinced Jackson to hate Calhoun was an 1818 letter from Calhoun, who was then President Monroe's Secretary of War, to Van Buren's old ally William Crawford. In it, Calhoun expressed a desire to courts-martial and censure then-General Jackson for his order-exceeding conduct during the First Seminole War; Jackson, who could hold a grudge like perhaps no other president, was incensed. Later, Calhoun used diplomatic instructions issued by Secretary of State Van Buren during trade negotiations with the British to undermine his diplomatic appointment.
Van Buren thus missed the first-ever Democratic National Convention, which had been held in Baltimore at the end of May and which had nominated him to run as veep on Jackson's re-election ticket. This was a little ironic, for he had been one of the earliest movers in favor of a national convention – he'd begun talking about the idea with members of the "Richmond Junto," Virginia's version of the Albany Regency, a decade earlier. With Calhoun – having made Van Buren into a martyr by his misguided "vengeance" – resigning the Vice Presidency and stalking off to South Carolina to become a Senator again, the need to heal rifts in the Democratic Party (which considered itself the heirs to Jefferson's Republicans) was clear:
"The recommendation of a Convention at Baltimore to nominate a candidate for the Vice-Presidency deserves a serious consideration. It is probably the best plan which can be adopted to produce entire unanimity in the Republican party, and secure its lasting ascendancy."
The Globe newspaper, Washington, July 6, 1831; via Wikipedia
So it was that his pissing contest with Martin Van Buren ended forever any presidential aspirations held by John C. Calhoun, and relegated a man who was once at the core of an emerging political party to the role of sectional leader and a footnote listing him as the first Vice President to resign from office.
Delegates to the DNC were apparently warned that they were to vote for Van Buren or have to take matters up with General Jackson himself, which liked helped Van Buren to win with over 70% of the vote. State nominations of Jackson for president were endorsed, a resolution to report the outcome of the Convention to state constituencies was adopted, and delegates listened to a speech by the New Yorkers which called out Henry Clay's National Republicans as re-branded Federalists and denounced the concept of nullification, while strongly asserting that Martin Van Buren was the greatest constructionist thing since sliced bread (though, of course, sliced bread wouldn't hit the market for another 96 years).
Too Big Too Fail, My Ass
The early part of Andrew Jackson's second term was dominated by his war with the Second Bank of the United States, the private institution which served as the repository of federal funds and thus the controller of the nation's money supply. It started when Henry Clay, Jackson's opponent in the 1832 election, sought to re-charter the Bank four years early as a means of scoring political points against a President who clearly would have to support an institution that was Too Big To Fail. The fight soon got ugly:
Bank President Nicholas Biddle used many questionable tactics to help his supporters. These included altering lending practices for political gain, redirecting funds to friendly sources, and publishing scathing newspaper articles about opponents. The Bank directly contributed $100,000 to Clay’s presidential campaign. Indirectly, the Bank controlled thousands of potential voters. To many, including President Jackson, the Bank posed both a constitutional and a political threat.
ibid
Andrew Jackson is a highly polarizing figure in American history, but one thing that all sides can agree on is this: he was not given over to fawning subservience before the monied elites of his day. Clay's ploy to box him in was rejected with a veto (drafted in part by Van Buren) which listed these reasons, among others, for the Bank to go pound sand:
The Bank dangerously centralized financial power in a single institutionThe Bank represented an unconstitutional monopoly on finance that only helped the rich get richerThe Bank exposed the U.S. government to control by foreign and special interestsThe Bank exercised too much control over members of CongressThe Bank favored northeastern states (where most finance was located) over southern and western states
ibid
Jackson dispatched Van Buren to Capitol Hill to organize a successful defense against the override attempt; part of the wheeling and dealing to keep the nullification sympathizers on board was the passage of a compromise tariff, which the Little Magician also helped to secure. In retaliation, and thinking "Astroturf" more than a century before the stuff would be invented, the Bank had copies of Jackson's veto message distributed among the populace. It backfired – rather than inspiring support for the Bank, the campaign accidentally tapped into the very populist appeal that had brought Jackson to power in the first place, and contributed to he and Van Buren's overwhelming victory in 1832.
Van Buren is at the center, choking out some of the Second Bank's underling heads, while Jackson heroically beats the crap out of Nicholas Biddle, presumably with a hickory cane.
Riding (and helping to generate) a wave of discontent with the Bank, Jackson then sought to destroy it. Bank President Nicholas Biddle had imposed orders that loan repayments to the Bank would have to be made in hard currency, which threw the debt-financed frontier into economic chaos as large banks in the west shook down their debtors for any loose gold and silver. Jackson's response: pull all federal deposits out of the Second Bank of the United States, thus stripping it of the guaranteed vault full of cash and specie it had hitherto enjoyed. Everybody in Washington knew the order was coming and that the fight in the Senate was going to be epic, and Van Buren's political instincts told him to lay low for a while:
Apprehensive—with good reason, as it turned out—that he would be regarded both as the author of this controversial move and as the pawn of Wall Street bankers who expected to benefit from the Philadelphia-based bank's demise, Van Buren was conspicuously absent from Washington that fall [1833]. The opposition would inevitably "relieve the question . . . from the influence of your well deserved popularity with the people," he wrote Jackson from New York in September, "by attributing the removal of the deposits to the solicitat[i]ons of myself and the monied junto in N. York, and as it is not your habit to play into the enemies hands you will not I know request me to come down unless there is some adequate inducement for my so doing."
senate.gov
He took up his seat as President of the Senate in mid-December, 1833, to find a legislative body in complete disarray. The disunified opposition held a slim majority, but had stripped the President Pro Tempore, a future Whig whose own support for Jackson's policies was flagging, of his power to make committee appointments nonetheless. Without sufficient numbers on either side, the Senate had spent two weeks farting around. Van Buren, with the aid of Tennessee Senator Felix Grundy, got the process moving, but they were forced to make some compromises, and some powerful chairmanships went to anti-Jacksonites.
Also of grave concern on Van Buren's first day in charge of the Senate was the matter of the body's December 11 request that President Jackson provide them with advance documentation regarding his bank funds withdrawal directive. Since Van Buren hadn't been around to advise him on a response, Jackson had composed the reply himself. It was worthy of a Nixon or a W. for its intransigent appeal to executive privilege:
"I have yet to learn under what constitutional authority that branch of the Legislature has a right to require of me an account of any communication."
via senate.gov
Jackson went ahead with his bank-shuttering plans and relied on Martin Van Buren to run interference in the Senate, especially after Henry Clay introduced two resolutions to censure the President for his executive overreach. Since Van Buren wasn't allowed to take part in the debate, he tapped as his surrogate Silas Wright, a Senator from New York, and provided Wright with all the written speechifying he'd need to present the administration's case during the three months it took to debate the censure measures.
Van Buren remained poised and genial throughout the proceedings – this was not a Senate President who would ever even think to invite a member to, say, go **** himself on the Senate floor. Daily he had to sit and listen to the opposition rail against Jackson and everything Jackson-esque, finding only the odd occasion to display his devastating wit.
He had such an opportunity one day in March, 1834, when Henry Clay got in his face (so to speak), addressing Van Buren directly and pleading with him to go and tell Jackson
"in the language of truth and sincerity, the actual condition of his bleeding country."
Clay then spent some time pandering to the galleries, reminding Van Buren of the influence he enjoyed at the court of King Andrew (paraphrasing is mine, but Clay was making the same point – u.m.), while the Vice President sat on the dais, listening politely. When Clay was finished, Van Buren silently handed his gavel to Hugh Lawson White and descended to the floor. Clay rose to stand next to his desk when Van Buren, now playing to an utterly silent hall, walked straight toward him at a deliberate pace – but even a politician as great as Henry Clay had no idea what to do when Van Buren bowed deeply at the waist and in the most sarcastic of tones, bummed some tobacco:
"Mr. Senator, allow me to be indebted to you for another pinch of your aromatic Maccoboy."
Clay had nothing: he gestured helplessly toward the snuff on his desk, and everybody in the gallery laughed at him. Van Buren dug himself out a pinch and, still not cracking a smile, made his way back to the dais.
The censures against Jackson eventually passed, making Old Hickory the only president to have been so punished (they were rescinded three years later by a more favorable legislature, anyway). That said, being officially censured by Act of Congress meant about as much to Jackson as similar measures did so recently to Rep. Charlie Rangell – indeed, he was able to turn them into populist propaganda in time for the 1834 midterms. His detractors had badly miscalculated America's feelings toward the Bank and how Jackson would be perceived for slaying it: though they finally and officially coalesced under the brand-new Whig Party banner, they were unable to best Martin Van Buren's message machine, and the Jacksonians were swept into majority power in both houses of Congress
"Weasel." – J.C. Calhoun
Things stayed acrimonious in the Senate – I encountered several sources, all undocumented, that told of Van Buren carrying loaded pistols to dais with him, but couldn't find any readily-accessible primary sources to confirm – and remember that this was an era in which "acrimony" actually meant something. Nowadays, we face a situation more like that depicted in the 1954 classic Warner Brothers cartoon, Sheep Ahoy (see picture), but in the 1830s...well, let's put it this way: Lieberman would not be chairing any committees.
Henry Clay and (especially) John Calhoun continuously laid legislative traps for Van Buren, to the point where
the struggle took its toll on Van Buren, who eventually came to regard his duties as president of the opposition-controlled Senate as "so distasteful and so wearing" that, according to a modern biographer, he suffered "more than his share of colds and debilitating upsets."
senate.gov
He never backed down from the fight, though he did compromise on a few core beliefs along the way. Van Buren was a northerner who personally supported emancipation, but needed the votes of southerners if he were to have any chance of seeing his administration's policies put into practice. Though the phrase hadn't been coined yet, he took the dodge of Popular Sovereignty, saying that slavery is a matter best left to the states. This, however, wasn't always enough to keep him out of the growing slavery fray.
During the Age of Jackson, abolitionists were a pretty fringy group. They plugged away, to be sure, and eventually achieved the vast bulk of their aims, but we tend to forget that it took more than one generation, and that the 1830s were only the beginning of the movement. Their tactics included submitting multiple petitions to Congress and sometimes rallying around a single polarizing issue, as they did in 1835-36 – right in the middle of Van Buren's presidential run. In that case, abolitionists were demanding an end to the slave trade in Washington, D.C., but Van Buren dismissed them with a classic pragmatist argument: he said opening the issue would
"distract Congress and the country . . . in the midst of a Presidential canvas."
Another favored tactic of the abolitionists was to send anti-slavery tracts in mass mailings to the South, and this caused Vice President Van Buren yet another run-in with John Calhoun. The measure before the Senate dealt with whether or not to allow state officials to confiscate federal mail which violated state law (there had been a near-riot in Charlestown, SC, after an abolitionist mailing in 1835), and Calhoun engineered a means of forcing Van Buren to go on record for all the South to see. He fixed a procedural vote in such a way that the results were tied, but to his great surprise, Van Buren didn't hesitate to break it in favor of moving the bill forward. He knew he didn't have anything to lose – the bill went down in flames when voted on "for real" – so all Calhoun's trickery managed was to give Martin Van Buren a means of reassuring southern voters that he wasn't go to go all abo on them if they elected him to office a few months later.
Historiorant
Why Van Buren? Because I caught myself the other day doing something an historian should never do: making a generality based on hearsay. The topic of ineffectual governance and lame administrations had come up, and I invoked Van Buren in the context of a smooth political operator who'd been incapable of dealing with the crises of his times. Since I don't have a super-solid background in the politics of the Jacksonian Age, it wasn't really fair to the memory of a president that not many of us know much about, nor to an era in American history that the majority of us find pretty hazy.
Martin Van Buren was a politician, through and through. His interpersonal skills, charm, and sense of humor would have made him successful in any age, but to rise to the top in the truly vicious political arena of antebellum America...well, that's something. He went head to head with the greatest Senators that body has ever known, and usually won. He was a small, somewhat effete New Yorker who became the protégé and heir to a Tennessee populist known for dueling.
The next diary will examine the reward all those machinations got him...and at the role plain old bad luck can play in determining a president's historical legacy.