MARTIN VAN BUREN

8th President, 1837–1841

Overall Rank: 34

Total Score: 450

In the 2017 survey, historians ranked Van Buren among the bottom ten presidents for the first time. Van Buren’s declining overall rating has been fueled by drops in economic management (from 34th in 2000 to 40th in 2017) and vision/setting an agenda (from 27th to 33rd). Historians ranked Van Buren 30th in pursued equal justice for all—eight spots above the man he succeeded, Andrew Jackson.

Party: Democrat

b. December 5, 1782, Kinderhook, New York

d. July 24, 1862, Kinderhook, New York

First Lady: Angelica Singleton Van Buren (daughter-in-law)

Age entering office: 54

Historian: Michael Douglas Henderson

Historian Michael Henderson was the superintendent of the Martin Van Buren National Historic Site in Kinderhook, New York, when he joined C-SPAN on May 3, 1999, as part of the network’s yearlong American Presidents television series, to discuss President Van Buren.

In the election of 1836, Martin Van Buren is the anointed, the chosen son [of Andrew Jackson], and the economy is still reasonably booming. There’s still lots of turmoil, but Van Buren wins with a reasonable majority in 1836. Several weeks into his administration, the United States suffers its first major economic recession, or depression, depending I suppose on where it fell on you.

Martin Van Buren was about five feet six, so he was certainly one of the shortest of our presidents. He was a delicate-featured young man with red hair, and he balded quite early in his life. He got to be relatively rotund, about 170 pounds, so he was sort of plump and pleasant, and he was supposed to have the most intriguing, sparkling blue eyes, which were… quite captivating. He was a native Dutch speaker, although he certainly spoke English quite fluently. The Dutch language survived in the Hudson Valley a couple hundred years after the British conquest. So, he may have had a Hudson Valley accent to his English speaking, but he was also not a great orator. He didn’t have a wonderful rolling voice that would gain him popularity in public speaking; he had a high voice.

Van Buren’s wife Hannah Hoes died in 1819 after twelve years of marriage. One child died in infancy, Winfield Scott Van Buren, but he had five kids who grew to maturity, and they were a very close family.

Van Buren didn’t own slaves in his house [in Kinderhook, New York]. After he had inherited slaves from his father’s estate, he was rid of them quite quickly. But wage labor [which he employed] was also very hard, although certainly not the evil that slavery is.… It’s important to talk about slavery in the North. We often go to Southern plantations, where we talk about slavery, or we talk about slavery in the South, or in Washington. It’s important to talk about slavery [in the North, too]. Kinderhook was a large slaveholding community. When Martin Van Buren was a young man, Kinderhook was one of the largest slave-owning communities in New York State outside of New York City.

… Van Buren started out his career as a lawyer. It was something that his mother was interested in. He was… schooled formally to the age of fourteen. He then was apprenticed in a lawyer’s shop and read for the law. Although he passed the bar by the time he was twenty-one years old, he always, in his career, felt a little uncomfortable about his [lack of] formal education. His interest in politics was pretty early on, and I don’t know that it was necessarily a search for power as much as it was a search for power to do good and to continue this experiment in American democracy.

[He helped develop] the Albany Regency,… the first formal political machine in the country. New York State was split into four districts at that time, and what Van Buren did while he was in the state assembly and state senate was ensure that the party would be in Albany for votes, a critical thing when you’re trying to keep an agenda, just making sure people show up. Also [he insisted] that there was a political orthodoxy.… For the first time, a party actually defined what they were; they had a platform, and they actually showed up for votes. So, that’s the core of what the Albany Regency was. What it allowed him to do as a politician was to say, “I can deliver New York State.” It gave him a lot of clout and a lot of power to bargain with.

[Martin Van Buren was Andrew Jackson’s second-term vice president in 1832.] Andrew Jackson’s first vice president was John C. Calhoun. Calhoun was certainly a man of many grudges and many strong feelings. Throughout the beginning of the Jackson administration, there were many disagreements between the cabinet members over the Margaret [Peggy] Eaton [scandal], and there were many opportunities to be downwardly mobile for Mr. Calhoun. Calhoun was in a position where he thought he could try to oust Martin Van Buren, who was secretary of state, from any further political career. After the resignation of the entire cabinet [over the Peggy Eaton affair], Jackson appoints Van Buren to be the ambassador to Great Britain.… Van Buren goes off to England and then is highly embarrassed by the fact that the Senate does not confirm his nomination.

His appointment was rejected by the Senate by one vote and very consciously—the one vote was the tie-breaking vote of the president of the Senate, who is the seated vice president, John C. Calhoun. Calhoun thought that this was his opportunity to finally get rid of Van Buren. Calhoun was much more extreme in his states’ rights views. There had been lots of bad blood between Calhoun and Van Buren, and Calhoun thought that this was the way to just kill Van Buren once and for all. Van Buren had already traveled to Europe. He was already in England, the Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Saint James,… the most important ambassadorial position. Andrew Jackson doesn’t take this well. He had nominated Martin Van Buren for this position, and he is quite upset, to say the least, about this vote in the Senate. And, in effect, what happens is Calhoun shoots his own career in the foot.

The Eaton affair is interesting [and it essentially set Martin Van Buren up to succeed Andrew Jackson as president in 1836]. Van Buren referred to it sometimes as “Eaton fever” or “Eaton malaria.” John Eaton, who was one of Jackson’s cabinet members, married a young woman who was from Washington, Margaret Eaton. She was very much [disdained] by other members of the Jackson cabinet. One of the reasons that Van Buren and Jackson engineered the whole resignation of the first cabinet during the first Jackson administration was to try to clear out Calhoun and clear this mess up.

Peggy Eaton… was a young woman who… was very much acting in a “masculine” fashion and was relating to the masculine world. As such, she was very much resented and detested by other cabinet members’ wives, particularly Calhoun’s wife. They implied that she was a slut. Peggy Eaton’s problem was that she was in some ways liberated in an area and put in a social elevation where she couldn’t [fit in]. The Eaton affair really backfired, again, on Calhoun. Calhoun keeps getting stuck in these terrible positions. Calhoun’s wife detested Peggy Eaton, and the other cabinet members wouldn’t… be seen with her. Van Buren is a bachelor, so it’s very easy for Van Buren to be polite and cordial; it’s his nature to begin with, and he sees no problem with entertaining both Mr. and Mrs. Eaton. Andrew Jackson is still bitter and hurt over his wife Rachel’s death and feeling that Rachel’s death was brought on prematurely by people who maligned her because of her not-quite divorce and then marriage to Jackson.… Jackson feels that Mrs. Eaton is being hard done to, and there is Van Buren taking up Mrs. Eaton’s cause. Van Buren is in a position of looking like a gentleman and supporting this woman who is being much maligned by these bickering cabinet wives. Van Buren, known as the “Little Magician,” manages to pull this one off well. It’s a fascinating story about political intrigue.

[Martin Van Buren was fifty-four years old when he went into the White House in 1837.] His popularity went continually down. Needless to say, he had the problem of the United States having its first major recession weeks after he was in office. He said, and probably rightly so, it was due to the expansion of credit. But he also… really believed that it was not the role of the federal government to save individuals. That was the role of the states, or the communities, or the church, or somebody else. The Constitution didn’t give that role to the federal government. [But] people were hurting, and they wanted the president to do something.

An economic recession and the fractious slavery debate plagued the presidency of Martin Van Buren, who is depicted in this c. 1840–1862 photo. Courtesy Library of Congress

Van Buren was a strict constructionist in his interpretation of the Constitution. He very strongly felt the way the Jeffersonians did, that if it wasn’t in the Constitution, these were powers that were either given to the federal government, denied to the federal government, or reserved for the states. And, spending federal moneys on improvements that didn’t benefit the entire nation was something that shouldn’t be done. You would see that occasionally federal moneys were spent on the improvement of harbors because a harbor is a point of entry for the entire country.

Van Buren used the White House for his charming little dinner parties, much along the lines of his political nature, on a one-on-one basis. There was an interesting episode in which he, again, lost some favor politically. First, he renovated the White House, which, at best, hadn’t been done since the first Jackson administration. So, there was a request for several thousands of dollars to renovate the White House that got him in a little trouble with the Congress. And then Angelica Singleton Van Buren decided for her opening at the White House—her debut as the daughter-in-law of the president [and official hostess]—that they would do a stylized tableau in Grecian form. Guests entered the White House in their Grecian tableau, and it didn’t go over well. It smacked of imperialism and of “King Martin.” They… didn’t do that again.

[On the slavery issue] Martin Van Buren runs a very difficult course throughout his entire career. He was born into a family that owned slaves; he inherited two slaves from his father. He is putting together a political party, the Democrats, of which the primary concern is the maintenance of the Union, to keep the Union together. [They believed] that this very new experiment in American democracy had to be preserved. The founding fathers weren’t able to deal with the issues of slavery; they even wrote it into the Constitution. So, by the time you get to Van Buren’s generation, this second generation of Americans, it’s a very testy issue. The country is becoming polarized,… and Van Buren’s position shifts throughout his career.

Van Buren is a supporter of the Gag Rule [employed in the US House from 1835 to 1844]. He is the chief magistrate of a country that is perpetuating one of the greatest evils known to mankind, chattel slavery. But he is also trying to push the envelope against the tide of slavery. He’s certainly always against the extension of slavery into free territories. You see in his losing the Democratic nomination in 1844 and again in 1848, when he’s running on the Free Soil Liberty Party, that Van Buren’s position on slavery is actually moving to the left, which is unusual in older politicians to become more liberal.

… [The Amistad case happened during his administration. In 1839,] Africans who are “cargo” on a Spanish ship mutiny. The ship is captured. It comes into Long Island, then the slaves are brought to Connecticut. The Van Buren administration realizes that this is going to be a lose-lose situation all the way around, and their initial effort is to keep it out of the courts. This is a very complicated issue.… So, the administration’s initial response is to say that this is an issue of international affairs. This is cargo because Africans who are slaves are “cargo”—as difficult as that is to talk about—perhaps belonging to the Spanish crown. Spain, at this time, is a superpower and not a country to be ignored.

Later, once the issue of how the Africans are going to be handled comes into the courts, it becomes a different issue, and the Van Buren administration then says it’s a judicial one; the executive branch is not going to go into it. It’s a very difficult situation for him, politically, because this is opening up wounds which are just under the surface. We had just been through the nullification crisis with South Carolina. We already have Southern Democrats who are on the edge of deserting. And in hindsight, it’s very easy to look back and say, “Well, the Civil War was a long way away.” At the time, nobody quite knows what’s going to happen. John Quincy Adams, who’s also a fascinating character, the old man, [the seventy-four-year-old former president who has been elected to the House of Representatives, represents the Amistad slaves before the Supreme Court in 1840–1841]. He absolutely detests Martin Van Buren [because] Van Buren is supporting the Gag Rule, which means you can’t mention the word “slavery,” the S word, in the Congress, which is absolutely the most undemocratic and un-American thing you can imagine. The reason people are supporting the Gag Rule is they don’t know what’s going to happen. So, the Amistad event, which goes over the course of several years and several trials, is a very interesting blip in what’s going to become this polarization in American politics. John Quincy Adams takes full advantage of this. In his famous 1841 [Amistad closing argument] speech,… Adams is talking about the evils of the Van Buren administration and Martin Van Buren. Adams is taking this opportunity to politicize this issue.

Indian removal [first] became a big issue during the Jackson administration. Jackson was wholeheartedly for the removal of Indians.… [Martin Van Buren, however,] grew up in the East. The Indians were already gone from the Northeast, so it was very easy to have a slightly softer position on Native Americans. From 1830, when the legislation is passed for Indian removal, through the actual removal, which is during the Van Buren administration, 1838, it’s another one of those nasty things that’s being done. The Indian removal and the Trail of Tears weren’t intended to be as harsh as they were, but it was harsh. These people were basically exterminated. They were walked to death. It was a terrible thing. Van Buren speaks about Indian removal in many of his speeches in a kind of Jeffersonian way, that if we remove the Indians, it will help them be preserved. That’s a lame argument.…

By 1840, the Whig opposition basically decided that they wanted to oust Van Buren at any price, and that the Whigs needed to be back in power. As the electorate is expanding through the Jacksonian period and more free white males are enfranchised to vote, the nature of politics changes, and the nature of campaigning changes. So, by 1840, you have the first real modern campaign with mudslinging, with campaign songs, slogans like “keep the ball rolling.” There were all kinds of modern pieces of a political campaign that come by 1840. Martin Van Buren did not campaign in 1840; he stayed in the White House and did business. He felt that it was somehow unbecoming to campaign, much as some of the founding fathers thought that it was in bad taste to go out and pound the pavement for a job, that anybody who wanted it that much probably shouldn’t get it. In many respects, he lost the election of 1840 rather than William Henry Harrison winning it.…

[Even though he had lost the election in 1840, Van Buren]… went into the 1844 Democratic committee meeting assuming that he had the nomination tied up. He was the heir apparent. He was the leader of the Democratic Party, but he got caught up in a question about the annexation of Texas. There were a lot of issues associated with Texas: the extension of slavery into a new territory, but there were also debts associated with Texas. Van Buren was concerned that if we annexed Texas too quickly, we might go to war with Mexico. He wrote a very long position paper, almost like a state paper, the Hammett letter, where he talks about how, legally, the US federal government is to treat territories. This letter got out before the convention. It was published, and although Van Buren was seen in the convention as not supporting the annexation of Texas, it was not exactly true. He was not supporting the immediate annexation of Texas.

He loses the floor fight in the Democratic convention, and James K. Polk, a much more hot-headed Westerner who is very supportive of the annexation of Texas, wins. Andrew Jackson supports Polk at this point as well. Van Buren feels a little hard done to because he really expected the blessings of his party. This is a party he worked years to create and to hold together and a party that he believed would hold the Union together. He really felt that this annexation of Texas was a hot-headed thing and might roll us into a war with Mexico, and indeed it did. He felt very cheated by this nomination, although he didn’t give up the ship. Van Buren comes back again in 1848, but on a different tack.

By 1848, more has gone on: the Southern wing of the Democratic Party has really become beholden to slave power. The very delicate balance of power in the Democratic Party between the Northerners and the urban Irish immigrant populations and the Southern slaveholders is beginning to crumble. Each side is becoming more polarized, and the Southern slaveholders are becoming so strong within the Democratic Party that they make the question of the extension of slavery in the new territories a litmus test.… The Democratic Party accepts a plank for the annexation of Texas. When you create those types of political litmus tests, you polarize the issue and the party. So, by 1848, Van Buren has moved on. He’s never willing to renege his party membership; it means too much to him personally. He spent his whole life creating the Democratic Party. But he is willing to put his name in the ring for something that his son, John Van Buren, is very interested in, which is this coalition of the Free Soil Party and the Liberty Party. They are the barn burners, the wing of the Democratic Party so interested in getting the slaveholders out of the party that they’re willing to burn the barn down to get rid of the rats.

In Van Buren’s case, he gives it a lot of thought. His son John Van Buren, who becomes attorney general of the state of New York, is really on the antislavery side. Van Buren has moved that way, and he’s willing to accept the nomination in 1848 because he thinks that it’s time to draw the line in the sand. He’s been a compromiser his entire life. The issue becomes, how far can you compromise? If you’re going to dance with the devil, how long are you going to do it? And in that respect, Van Buren, in 1848, that’s his last chance to make a statement about his vision of keeping the Union together. [He received just 10 percent of the vote.]

[After the White House, Van Buren returned to Lindenwald, his home in Kinderhook.] Lindenwald was run as a working farm. While he was running for president up through the 1840s, he always had a farm manager. After that, he ran the farm himself. He was very interested in agriculture, and he had very political motivations for purchasing Lindenwald. This is an urban guy, always well dressed. He came from a rural background, but for most of his political career, he’s a mover and a shaker in Washington. He realizes during his presidency that he’s espousing all of these Jeffersonian agrarian values, but he hasn’t engaged in them himself. So he buys the farm and… fixes it up and spends the next twenty-one years of his life here. In 1850, in the census, he lists his occupation as “farmer.”

When he came back to Lindenwald, his son Abraham and his wife Angelica Singleton… came there.… He was very much a family man: like George H. W. Bush, his family referred to him as “Poppy.” He had grandchildren he adored. He loved spending time with his grandchildren, and all of the sons and their spouses had favorite bedrooms that were theirs to come and stay in.

Henry Clay was a guest; Thomas Hart Benton was a guest; many of the political leaders of the day came to his house.… Van Buren, even though he’s no longer president, is still a driving force in American politics, and you see Van Buren as a major character in political cartoons well into the 1850s. Long after he’s left the presidency, he is an elder statesman who people come to consult with.

He lived to be seventy-nine and a half years old. He died in July [1862].

Martin Van Buren was chief magistrate at the time that the United States was perpetuating the worst crime of humanity on a large group of the population. I’m a black American myself; I feel this awful [legacy], but I also feel that it’s important to have this conversation [about slavery]. Martin Van Buren, like all other humans, do the best that they can at the time and make compromises.… The compromises Van Buren made should not have been made.… He did many good things, but he also did many terrible things, certainly Indian removal on the Trail of Tears, the supporting of the Gag Rule. These were all calculated political measures [on his part] to keep the Union together.

If you look at Martin Van Buren’s political career and focus the whole thing through Union maintenance and how critically important that they felt that this experiment in democracy was, it gives you a different angle to look at. In no way do I want to say that Martin Van Buren was a great hero or ignore the evils that were carried out under his administration or during the period. But if you look at Washington through Lincoln, those sixteen presidents all are the chief magistrates charged with upholding the laws of the nation, a nation which has slavery written into the Constitution; it was constitutionally legitimized.…

Van Buren’s leadership style was very much behind-the-scenes. He was a coalition builder. He was a compromiser, like his quote, “Mutual forbearance and reciprocal concessions.” We all have to give a little bit in a democracy that’s based on a majority. In order to get a majority, a lot of people have to give up a little bit. His legacy is that it’s not through wars, not through coups, but through parties and through discussions that we can have this experiment in democracy continue.