Martin Van Buren (December 5, 1782July 24, 1862) was the eighth president of the United States, serving from 1837 to 1841. He co-founded the Democratic Party with Andrew Jackson and became Jackson's vice president from 1833 to 1837.
Van Buren was born in Kinderhook, New York, where most residents were of Dutch descent and spoke Dutch as their primary language. He is the only president to have spoken English as a second language. Van Buren entered politics as a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, won a seat in the New York State Senate in 1813, and was elected to the United States Senate in 1821. As the leader of the Bucktails faction of the party, he established the political machine known as the Albany Regency. Van Buren ran successfully for governor of New York to support Andrew Jackson's candidacy in the 1828 presidential election but resigned shortly after Jackson was inaugurated so he could accept appointment as Jackson's secretary of state. In the cabinet, Van Buren was a key Jackson advisor and built the organizational structure for the coalescing Democratic Party. He ultimately resigned to help resolve the Petticoat affair and briefly served as ambassador to the United Kingdom. At Jackson's behest, the 1832 Democratic National Convention nominated Van Buren for vice president, and he took office after the Democratic ticket won the 1832 presidential election.
With Jackson's strong support and the organizational strength of the Democratic Party, Van Buren successfully ran for president in the 1836 presidential election. However, his popularity soon eroded because of his response to the Panic of 1837, which centered on his Independent Treasury system, a plan under which the federal government of the United States would store its funds in vaults rather than in banks. More conservative Democrats and Whigs in Congress ultimately delayed Van Buren's plan from being implemented until 1840. His presidency was further marred by the costly Second Seminole War and his refusal to admit Texas to the Union as a slave state. In 1840, he lost his re-election bid to William Henry Harrison. While Van Buren is praised for anti-slavery stances, in historical rankings, historians and political scientists often rank him as a below-average U.S. president, due to his handling of the Panic of 1837.
He was initially the leading candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination again in 1844, but his continued opposition to the annexation of Texas angered Southern Democrats, leading to the nomination of James K. Polk. Van Buren grew increasingly opposed to slavery, and was the presidential nominee of the newly formed Free Soil Party in the 1848 United States presidential election, and his candidacy helped Whig nominee Zachary Taylor defeat Democrat Lewis Cass. Worried about sectional tensions, Van Buren returned to the Democratic Party after 1848 but was disappointed with the pro-southern presidencies of Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan.
During the American Civil War, Van Buren was a War Democrat who supported the policies of President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican. Van Buren died of asthma at his home in Kinderhook in 1862, aged 79.
Early life and education
Martin Van Buren was born on December 5, 1782, in Kinderhook, New York, His father, Abraham Van Buren, was a descendant of Cornelis Maessen, a native of Buurmalsen, Netherlands, who had emigrated to New Netherland in 1631 and purchased a plot of land on Manhattan Island. Van Buren was the first president born after the Declaration of Independence and the last born prior to British ratification of the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War. As a result, he was the last president to be born, (but not last to serve) a 'jus soli' British Subject by birth in one of the Thirteen Colonies. Abraham Van Buren had been a patriot during the American Revolution, and he later joined the Democratic-Republican Party. Abraham owned an inn and tavern in Kinderhook and served as Kinderhook's town clerk for several years. In 1776, he married Maria Hoes (or Goes) Van Alen (1746–1818) in the town of Kinderhook, also of Dutch extraction and the widow of Johannes Van Alen (1744–). She had three children from her first marriage, including future U.S. Representative James I. Van Alen. Her second marriage produced five children, of which Martin was the third.
Van Buren received a basic education at the village schoolhouse, and briefly studied Latin at the Kinderhook Academy and at Washington Seminary in Claverack. He had entirely Dutch ancestry and was raised speaking primarily Dutch, but he learned English while attending school and is the only president of the United States whose first language was not English. Also during his childhood, Van Buren learned at his father's inn how to interact with people from varied ethnic, income, and societal groups, which he used to his advantage as a political organizer. Van Buren's formal education ended in 1796, when he began reading law at the office of Peter Silvester and his son Francis.
Van Buren, at tall, was small in stature, and affectionately nicknamed "Little Van". He was also called the "Red Fox" due to his "bushy reddish sideburns, striking forehead and prominent nose". When Van Buren began his legal studies he wore rough, homespun clothing, causing the Silvesters to admonish him to pay greater heed to his clothing and personal appearance as an aspiring lawyer. He accepted their advice, and subsequently emulated the Silvesters' clothing, appearance, bearing, and conduct. The lessons Van Buren learned from the Silvesters were reflected in his career as a lawyer and politician, in which Van Buren was known for his amiability and fastidious appearance. Despite Kinderhook's strong affiliation with the Federalist Party, of which the Silvesters were also strong supporters, Van Buren adopted his father's Democratic-Republican leanings. The Silvesters and Democratic-Republican political figure John Peter Van Ness suggested that Van Buren's political leanings constrained him to complete his education with a Democratic-Republican attorney, so Van Buren spent a final year of apprenticeship in the New York City office of John Van Ness's brother William P. Van Ness, a political lieutenant of Aaron Burr. Van Ness introduced Van Buren to the intricacies of New York state politics, and Van Buren observed Burr's battles for control of the state Democratic-Republican party against George Clinton and Robert R. Livingston. He returned to Kinderhook in 1803, after his admission to the New York bar.
Van Buren married Hannah Hoes in Catskill, New York, on February 21, 1807, when he was 24 years old and she was 23. She was his childhood sweetheart and a daughter of his maternal first cousin, Johannes Dircksen Hoes. She grew up in Valatie, and like Van Buren, her home life was primarily Dutch as she spoke Dutch as her first language, and spoke English with a marked accent. The couple had six children, four of whom lived to adulthood: Abraham (1807–1873), unnamed daughter (stillborn around 1809), John (1810–1866), Martin Jr. (1812–1855), Winfield Scott (born and died in 1814), and Smith Thompson (1817–1876). Hannah contracted tuberculosis, and died in Kinderhook on February 5, 1819. Martin Van Buren never remarried.
Early political career
Upon returning to Kinderhook in 1803, Van Buren formed a law partnership with his half-brother, James Van Alen, and became financially secure enough to increase his focus on politics. Van Buren had been active in politics from age 18, if not before. In 1801, he attended a Democratic-Republican Party convention in Troy, New York, where he worked successfully to secure for John Peter Van Ness the party nomination in a special election for the 6th Congressional District seat. Upon returning to Kinderhook, Van Buren broke with the Burr faction, becoming an ally of both DeWitt Clinton and Daniel D. Tompkins. After the faction led by Clinton and Tompkins dominated the 1807 elections, Van Buren was appointed Surrogate of Columbia County, New York. Seeking a better base for his political and legal career, Van Buren and his family moved to the town of Hudson, the seat of Columbia County, in 1808. Van Buren's legal practice continued to flourish, and he traveled all over the state to represent various clients.
In 1812, Van Buren won his party's nomination for a seat in the New York State Senate. Though several Democratic-Republicans, including John Peter Van Ness, joined with the Federalists to oppose his candidacy, Van Buren won election to the state senate in mid-1812. Later in the year, the United States entered the War of 1812 against Great Britain, while Clinton launched an unsuccessful bid to defeat President James Madison in the 1812 presidential election. After the election, Van Buren became suspicious that Clinton was working with the Federalist Party, and he broke from his former political ally.
During the War of 1812, Van Buren worked with Clinton, Governor Tompkins, and Ambrose Spencer to support the Madison administration's prosecution of the war. In addition, he was a special judge advocate appointed to serve as a prosecutor of William Hull during Hull's court-martial following the surrender of Detroit. Anticipating another military campaign, he collaborated with Winfield Scott on ways to reorganize the New York Militia in the winter of 1814–1815, but the end of the war halted their work in early 1815. Van Buren was so favorably impressed by Scott that he named his fourth son after him. Van Buren's strong support for the war boosted his standing, and in 1815, he was elected New York Attorney General. Van Buren moved from Hudson to the state capital of Albany, where he established a legal partnership with Benjamin Butler, and shared a house with political ally Roger Skinner. In 1816, Van Buren won re-election to the state senate, and he continued to simultaneously serve as attorney general. In 1819, he played an active part in prosecuting the accused murderers of Richard Jennings, the first murder-for-hire case in the state of New York.
Albany Regency After Tompkins was elected as vice president in the 1816 presidential election, Clinton defeated Van Buren's preferred candidate, Peter Buell Porter, in the 1817 New York gubernatorial election. Clinton threw his influence behind the construction of the Erie Canal, an ambitious project designed to connect Lake Erie to the Atlantic Ocean. Though many of Van Buren's allies urged him to block Clinton's canal bill, Van Buren believed the canal would benefit the state. His support for the bill helped it win approval from the New York legislature. Despite his support for the Erie Canal, Van Buren became the leader of an anti-Clintonian faction in New York known as the "Bucktails".
The Bucktails succeeded in emphasizing party loyalty. Through his use of patronage, loyal newspapers, and connections with local party officials and leaders, Van Buren established what became known as the "Albany Regency", a political machine that emerged as an important factor in New York politics. The Regency relied on a coalition of small farmers, but also enjoyed support from the Tammany Hall machine in New York City. During this era, Van Buren largely determined Tammany Hall's political policy for New York's Democratic-Republicans.
A New York state referendum that expanded state voting rights to all white men in 1821, and which further increased the power of Tammany Hall, was guided by Van Buren. Although Governor Clinton remained in office until late 1822, Van Buren emerged as the leader of the state's Democratic-Republicans after the 1820 elections. Van Buren was a member of the 1820 state constitutional convention, where he favored expanded voting rights, but opposed universal suffrage and tried to maintain property requirements for voting.
Entry into national politics