Hey it’s Professor Dave, let’s talk about Martin Van Buren.
Martin Van Buren served a single term as the eighth President of the United States.
A founding member of the Democratic Party, he served in a number of political posts,
including U.S. Senator and Governor of New York, as well as Secretary of State and Vice
President, both under Andrew Jackson.
The son of a Dutch tavern keeper, young Van Buren learned early on how to interact with
people from differing ethnic, economic, and social strata, which he used to his advantage
as a political organizer.
He could mingle comfortably in upper class society as well as saloons.
A delegate to his first political convention at age 18, he quickly moved from local to
state politics, gaining renown as both a political organizer and an accomplished lawyer, and
he was elected to the Senate by the New York State Legislature in 1821.
Van Buren was a major supporter and organizer for Jackson in the 1828 election and ran for
Governor of New York, hoping that his popularity would help Jackson’s campaign.
Both men were elected, but after serving as governor for only two months, Van Buren resigned
to become Jackson’s Secretary of State.
In August 1831, Jackson gave Van Buren a recess appointment as Minister to Great Britain,
and he arrived in London only to later learn that the Senate had rejected his nomination.
The rejection was the work of Vice President John C. Calhoun, who believed Van Buren had
conspired to keep him from becoming the 1824 Vice-Presidential nominee by urging Henry
Clay to run instead.
Calhoun also resented Van Buren’s role in drafting the 1828 tariff, which Calhoun believed
had harmed his home state of South Carolina and led to the Nullification Crisis.
When the vote on Van Buren’s nomination was taken, many Calhoun supporters abstained,
producing a tie, giving Calhoun, in his role as presiding officer of the Senate, the ability
to cast a vote.
He voted against Van Buren, and achieved his revenge, convinced he’d ended Van Buren’s career.
“It will kill him dead, sir, kill him dead.
He will never kick, sir, never kick,” Calhoun exclaimed to a friend.
However, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton told Calhoun, “You have broken a minister
and made a Vice President.”
Senator and future President John Tyler of Virginia wrote to a friend, “Van Buren is
elevated by the silly thing of rejecting him.”
As both men predicted, the move backfired by making Van Buren seem a sympathetic victim
of petty partisan politics and it fell far from ending Van Buren’s career.
Van Buren became Jackson’s handpicked running mate and was elected Vice President in 1832.
Four years later, as Jackson’s designated successor, he was elected president.
As president, the hapless Van Buren was blamed for the Great Panic of 1837.
Even though the depression had been caused by Jackson’s economic policies, Van Buren
bore the brunt of the blame.
The Panic lasted through the 1840s and affected every region of the country; newspapers referred
to the President as “Martin Van Ruin.”
Van Buren’s attempts at economic recovery were thwarted by a hostile Congress that refused
to adopt his reforms until 1840.
Another unpopular action of Van Buren’s was his rejection of Texas to the Union, due
to his unwillingness to upset the delicate balance between free and slave states as formulated
by the Missouri Compromise.
He later hoped to avoid war with Mexico over Texas annexation by purchasing the territory
outright from Mexico but this was declined and led to the Mexican War during the Polk
Administration.
Van Buren’s inability to deal with the economic depression caused by the Panic of 1837 led
to his defeat in the 1840 election.
He lost to another military hero of the War of 1812, General William Henry Harrison, who
was also the first candidate of the Whig Party.
Van Buren attempted a comeback four years later but lost the Democratic nomination to
James K. Polk, who went on to win the election.
During the 1848 election, Van Buren ran unsuccessfully as the candidate of the anti-slavery Free
Soil Party, losing to another popular military leader, General Zachary Taylor, hero of the
recent Mexican War.
He then returned to the Democratic fold to support Franklin Pierce in 1852, James Buchanan
in 1856, and Stephen A. Douglas in 1860, but his increasingly abolitionist views led him
to support Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.
He died in July 1862.
Van Buren was the first in a series of weak Presidents whose failure to confront the growing
crisis of disunion over the cause of slavery led to the bloodiest conflict in American
History, the Civil War, whose wounds can still be felt today.
Until Lincoln took office, none of the presidents had the foresight to see that American Democracy
was incompatible with the moral abomination of slavery; the preservation of the Union
was their primary goal, as it had been of the Founding Fathers.
Like the Founders, they hoped the problem would simply solve itself and just fade away,
but this was not to be.
Martin Van Buren was essentially the first career politician, before him, all Presidents
had been statesmen or military heroes.
Van Buren’s most lasting achievement was not as President but as a political organizer
who helped build the modern Democratic Party, the oldest active political party in the world.