There are certain figures in American history who don't get the attention they deserve because the official narrative of American history tags them with a specific event. Martin Van Buren (1782–1862) is one of those people, and the specific event is the country's worst depression to date, the Panic of 1837, which he was saddled with by Andrew Jackson's monetary policy. Van Buren is much more interesting than that. To begin with, he was the major architect of the Democratic Party as well as our only President of 100% Dutch descent. He was our first president from New York. He also had a career after his presidency as the standard bearer of the Free Soil Democrats, not necessarily abolitionist but opposed to the extension of slavery. He was known as the Lion of Kinderhook (rendered in Dutch in the title) because he rose to power from modest origins over the objections of the patroons of the upper Hudson Valley, and then as the "Little Magician." Finally, if anyone can be called America's first professional politician, it's Matty Van.
(George Peter Alexander Healy, 1864 after a life study of 1858. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Lent by the White House Collection)
Yes, I have a great deal of respect and admiration for the man. Follow me below the great orange flourish to see why.
You probably think of this era as the era of Jacksonian Democracy, when for the first time it appeared that any American white man could succed. But Andrew Jackson, as much of a self-made man as he appeared to be, had used his postion as a treaty negotiator to make himself a very rich man. Martin Van Buren was perhaps even more representative of Jacksonian democracy than Jackson himself. He was one of the new career men in American politics (possibly the first real career politician), he had no ennobling ties with the founders, and he was not a military hero, and certainly not on Jackson’s level. But he had ambitions, and he wasn't stupid.
Van Buren was born in Kinderhook, New York, just south of Albany and east of the Hudson River in the heartland of Dutch upstate New York.
(Martin Van Buren National Historic Site, National Park Service; http://www.nps.gov/...)
His father was a farmer and a tavern keeper, but the tavern was a political gathering space, and it was there that Van Buren developed his interest in politics. At the age of 14, he apprenticed with a Federalist lawyer in Kinderhook, and five years after that he was sent to New York to study with William Van Ness, a well connected republican lawyer and an intimate of Aaron Burr. He returned to Kinderhook to practice law.
In 1812 he won a seat in the State Senate, and in 1815, he was elected New York's attorney general. Between 1817 and 1821, he and a group of young lawyers and journalists formed an accidental political party in opposition to DeWitt Clinton, developing a clear ideology and using the press to explain it. The Journalist Thurlow Weed tagged them the "Albany Regency" a group devoted to a return to Jeffersonian principles while recognizing the dramatic growth of New York State. The Regency held its first caucus as a separate party in 1819. In 1821, Van Buren was elected to the Senate to represent New York, and his allies won a majority on New York's council of appointment, which meant control of political patronage. The Regency also got approval for a constitutional convention to revise the state constitution of 1777: the new constitution enlarged suffrage and reformed the patronage and judiciary systems. From this, Van Buren learned how a political party worked, and that a political party could govern better than a group of unaffiliated individuals.
Between 1826 and 1828, Van Buren created a national political party based on what he had learned in New York. He had opposed John Quincy Adams, who he saw as a remnant of Federalism, and late in 1826 he and John Calhoun arranged a new opposition newspaper in Washington. Van Buren was able to organize the various regional groups in opposition to Adams and he became General Andrew Jackson's campaign manager. While Jackson was running for president in 1828, Van Buren ran for Governor of New York, in part to make sure Jackson carried the state. Both of them won, Jackson by an electoral vote landslide.
(http://www.trinityhistory.org/...)
By March 1829, Van Buren had resigned the governorship of New York to become Jackson's Secretary of State. In that role, he concluded America's first treaty with the Ottoman Empire. In August, 1831, Jackson made Van Buren Ambassador to England, but a year later, he returned to the United States to run as Jackson's vice president.Their victory in November 1832 cemented Van Buren's success as a professional politician.
In 1836, Jackson declared Van Buren his political heir. He won election easily because of the economic boom the country was experiencing.
(Wikimedia Commons)
We have to look at the economic boom, however. In 1831, Andrew Jackson succeeded in shutting down the Bank of the United States, which had been established by Alexander Hamilton during the first years of the Washington Administration. The country was immediately flooded with paper money from state banks (we wouldn't have a national currency until the Civil War), which led to speculative boom. Thanks to soaring receipts from land sales, the country found itself for the first and only time able to pay off the entire national debt. The growing surplus was distributed to the states. The speculative mania revived Jackson’s hard money instincts, and in 1836 he issued a Specie Circular declaring that only gold and silver would henceforth be accepted in payment for public lands. This led to a constriction of credit, and an unfavorable balance of trade with England forced a demand for payment from American bankers just as the price of cotton began to fall. Hence a depression - the Panic of 1837.
(Wikimedia Commons)
Van Buren’s presidency was defined by the Panic of 1837 and the subsequent depression, which lasted for two years; among other things, the panic led Herman Melville to go to sea. Van Buren called a special session of Congress to try to fix it, and offered a proposal to create an Independent Treasury separate from the banks motivated by Jacksonian unwillingness to discredit the deposit banks with which Jackson had replaced National Bank, and one to return to “hard money” (gold and silver coins in place of paper money). The Independent Treasury failed in the House of Representatives, and did not come into existence until 1840. Van Buren was also unable to commit to a position on slavery and became known as a Northern man with Southern principles. He did, however, resist the annexation of Texas, which had declared itself independent from Mexico in 1836. He also created the ten-hour day for federal workers (no more sunrise to sunset), and he commissioned the United States Exploring Expedition (the Ex Ex as it is now known) that mapped quite a bit of the remote regions of the Pacific Ocean in service of the whaling industry.
Van Buren ran for reelection in 1840 but he failed to perceive the possibility of having more than one genuinely popular party, and he lost the election to William Henry Harrison, the Whig candidate.
(Wikimedia Commons)
He broke the precedent against a defeated incumbent not attending the inauguration of his successor, which had been set by John Adams (Matty liked people!). He also returned to Lindenwald, the house on the outskirts of Kinderhook that he had purchased in 1839. He ran for President again in 1844, but the Democratic National Convention nominated James Knox Polk of Tennessee instead. In 1848, the country was presented with two possible answers to the territorial question posed by the Mexican War – Lewis Cass (D-Michigan)’s popular sovereignty -- each new territory could decide for itself -- pragmatism (he had helped defeat Martin Van Buren in the 1844 Democratic convention) and the Wilmot Proviso (no slavery in any new territories) absolutism of the newly organized northern Free-Soil party (Van Buren had finally broken with the Southern Democrats). Van Buren took enough votes from Cass to elect a man with no established political views and the weakest of ties to the party that nominated him: Zachary Taylor. He finally went into retirement as the Sage of Kinderhook and rejected an attempt by Franklin Pierce to lead a meeting of ex-presidents for peace as the Civil War approached, calling for New York Democrats to support Abraham Lincoln.
Van Buren died July 24, 1862. Abraham Lincoln marked his passing on July 25 thus:
The President with deep regret announces to the people of the United States the decease, at Kinderhook, N.Y, on the 24th Instant, of his honored predecessor Martin Van Buren.
This event will occasion mourning in the nation for the loss of a citizen and a public servant whose memory will be gratefully cherished. Although it has occurred at a time when his country is afflicted with division and civil war, the grief of his patriotic friends will measurably be assuaged by the consciousness that while suffering with disease and seeing the end approaching his prayers were for the restoration of the Government of which he had been the head and for peace and good will among his fellow citizens.
Union soldiers wore black crape on their left arms for the next six months, at Antietam and at Fredericksburg.
One of only two and a half presidents who are NOT of Anglo Saxon Protestant descent, the first president born an American citizen, and the creator of the Democratic Party. He doesn't deserve his obscurity.
It's probably time for me to forget doing these in any sort of chronological order. For the time being, I'll queue these to post Wednesday or Thursday evening, probably at 7 or 8 PM Eastern time, and I'm open to suggestion about the timing.
8:17 PM PT: Whoops! Shallow me! Season 10 of Project Runway starts tonight. I'll look in during the commercials.