Martin van Buren and the American Political System

Like many American’s, I knew very little about our eighth president Martin van Buren, until, that is, I read this weeks book, Martin van Buren and the American Political System by Donald B. Cole.

Martin van Buren was born on December 5, 1782, so the country was no longer strictly British colony, but was not yet a country, either. His family was not exactly wealthy, but it was not scrounging poor either. They were sort of middle class. The van Buren’s were 6th generation Dutch immigrants and very much a part of the Dutch community in upper New York state, and like all the van Buren’s, Martin’s branch was quite large, with his mother having two sons and a daughter from a previous marriage, before marrying Abraham van Buren and having five children, of which Martin was the third born but the first boy. The family was supportive of each other and close, earning their living was by running an Inn for travelers. This allowed Martin to learn how to interact with a wide range of people, from the families 6 slaves to the statesmen and wealthy who passed through town.

Martin’s mother believed in the value of education and Martin was taught math and reading, but there was not enough extra to send him for formal schooling in college. So, at the age of 14, he was apprenticed to the lawyer Francis Silvester. The Silvester’s were well off and influential, and van Buren learned from Silvester. He learned how to dress to make an impression, he learned about the law, and he learned the fundamentals of this new political system the United States had created. But for all that he learned, he remained self-conscious of his humble beginnings.

This was not quite a rags to riches situation, as his family was solidly middle class, but it was by his own strength, his own adaptability and flexibility, and his own wits, that he progressed through his successful law practice, into becoming a state senator in New York.

And so, like all the other presidents to date, van Buren started his career in politics as a lawyer. Back then, while law school was nice, it was by no means a requirement to practice. Remember, to date all the presidents went to school, then had to apprentice with a practicing lawyer before sitting for the bar. Van Buren skipped the school part, apprenticing early, and thus was practicing law by 1803, when he was only 20 years old. The Silvester’s, in addition to teaching van Buren how to dress and the fundamentals of law, tried to turn him in to a Federalist. But van Buren was more influenced by his own family leanings toward Jefferson’s Republican party.

Van Buren was, by all reports, an accomplished lawyer, and he was well on his way to making his living strictly from the law. And so, he married childhood sweetheart Hannah van Buren, when they were both about24, and they promptly began having children. They had four boys before Hannah died as a result of consumption on February 5, 1819, leaving him widowed with four children at the age of 36. Through all of this, his law practice is growing and he’s splitting his time between his position as state senator and his law practice.

Once he started jumping into politics, van Buren realized that even within the individual parties, there was too much factional infighting. This makes accomplishing goals as a unit difficult. So, this was his contribution to politics. He was part of creating something called The Albany Regency. Within the Republican party of New York, he oversaw a faction called the Bucktails. And his gift as organization. They organized everything. No move was made without communicating how this move would help the end goal, of consolidating power.

Van Buren was the first to put party above principle. So, thanks for that. But he used this organization and wheeling and dealing to change how the state of New York was run during that state’s constitutional convention in the Spring of 1821. And the Albany Regency became kind of the gold standard by which other political factions set themselves, trying to replicate that success. And this level of organization helped see van Buren into Senator from the state of New York to the federal office in DC. And this level of organization would help get Andrew Jackson elected.

The 1820’s saw van Buren trying to replicate his success as Kingmaker in New York into Kingmaker on a federal level…all while insisting he was for smaller, state centric government of the old Jeffersonian bent. One wonders, if watching Jackson grab that federal power and hug it close, van Buren ever had a moment of reflection and wondered if he again backed the wrong horse. I guess I’ll find that out in part 3. For part 2 though, the power slipped a little bit.

While building up the Albany Regency, van Buren insisted that everyone had to pull together, vote the same, that there could be no dissension in the ranks if they wanted to build a national level political party that would grab and retain power. And yet dissension happened, several times.

The first move van Buren made in the decade was to try and revive the two-party system, which had effectively ceased to exist with Monroe in the White House. Monroe’s eight years were known collectively as the Era of Good Feeling, and partisanship was a non-issue during this time. Well for a power-hungry bureaucrat, this simply will not do. Man needs an enemy to fight, so van Buren decided his enemy would be anyone who did not support old school Republicanism, a la Jeffersonian style. At least for now.

Among the many problems van Buren wanted to fix was that for the first 40 years the United States had been a nation, 36 of those years had been presided over by a president from Virginia (the four other years were Adam’s years…being the gentleman from Massachusetts). And in those same 40 years, New York had exploded both population wise and financially, to become the manufacturing powerhouse of the Northeast. In fact, Virginia’s power was waning, as tobacco crops had destroyed the farming capabilities, leaving the land basically barren and in desperate need of rejuvenation.

Prior to leaving for Washington, van Buren had succeeded in creating a two-party system in New York. There was the Republicanism he still held dear…and the Clintonians, aka Everyone Else. And to help build his old-style anti-federalist party, he turned to the senators from the south. Because that was where anti-federalism started. Here is where he first became acquainted with Andrew Jackson, who was voted in as Senator from Tennessee in 1823. Jackson was not van Buren’s initial choice of candidate to be president, and when the 1824 election heated up, van Buren supported William Harris Crawford. Even after Crawford had his stroke, van Buren was convinced Crawford would recover enough to be able to lead the country. The rest of the Regency, however, was not as convinced. And this tiny bit of a fraction caused enough strife, that when the 1824 election was held, van Buren no longer had the full support of the Regency team. This meant the electors were split, which caused no one candidate to reach the required majority to become president.

As we know, this caused the election to be thrown to the House of Representatives, who ultimately decided in favor of John Quincy Adams. Van Buren was livid over this split, and on his return to Washington, he skipped most of his usual connections, spurning social conversation with friends from the Regency who had not supported his choice in candidate. Eventually he got over it and made some very rapid advancements towards his cause of a new national party over the next three years.

If there is any one thing to admire about van Buren, his ability to bounce back after a set back ranks right up near the top. Realizing his has lost control of the Albany Regency, he begins to reconsolidate his footing there. He makes nice with Governor DeWitt Clinton, a former staunch enemy, and begins to lay the groundwork to back the next winning president. Who he was determined not be Adams. But he wasn’t quite sure who yet. Other books I’ve read indicate he backed Jackson from the word go, but that does not appear to be the case. After the Crawford fiasco, van Buren was a bit more cautious in who he chose for the next run at the Presidency.

Part of the problem, to me at least, seems to be an inherent inconsistency in his thinking. Van Buren claimed to be an old school, states rights, Jeffersonian Republican. But he couldn’t come to grips with whether he should be placing state goals ahead of national goals, or the other way around. Ultimately, after “fixing” the state of New York, meaning setting it up so key posts were handled not by election of the people, but by patronage of the powerful, he opted for national goals. And he turned his eye toward Kingmaking in Washington. And he was eventually convinced that Jackson was the man to oust Adams from the White House.

And as early as 1826, van Buren was actively electioneering for Jackson…two full years ahead of the next official campaign season. And we thought we had it bad. On the flip side, they did not have 24 hours news cycles, and news took considerably longer to travel back then. And through all this, Jackson was no fool. He knew van Buren had some game he was playing but couldn’t quite peg what. And so, for a while, it seemed Jackson might court DeWitt Clinton as a player on his team, to get Clinton’s assistance in winning New York. Then in a stroke of luck for van Buren, Clinton dropped dead. Now the only major political player in New York, van Buren was set to be Jackson’s man on the ground in the Empire State. And Jackson needed him, owing to Jackson being a known member of the Mason’s, and anti-Mason sentiment running high during this time due to the murder of a former Mason who had been set to publish a tell all book about the Masonic lodge.

In addition to being Jackson’s man on the ground in New York, this presented another opportunity to van Buren, and he was encouraged to run for the now vacant seat of Governor of New York. Which he did. And he won. Despite the anti-Masonic sentiments of the northern and western parts of the state. And shortly after being elected governor, he was offered the position of Secretary of State, which was seen at this point as the heir apparent to the presidency. So, he took it, and returned to Washington.

As we know from the book on Jackson, van Buren served as Secretary of State during Jackson’s first 2 years in office, before stepping down from that position and becoming minister to England. This book provides a little more detail regarding that event.

In the book on Jackson, it was presented as van Buren came up with this idea so that Jackson could oust the rest of his cabinet and start fresh after the Peggy Eaton scandal. And that was certainly part of it. Bu the other part, addressed in this month’s book, is that VP Calhoun was stirring up trouble, and trying to lay it at the feet of van Buren. Calhoun had already determined he would not be seeking a second term as vice-president under Jackson, but he wanted to take van Buren down with him. So, the rumor mill starts up, basically claiming that van Buren was the one driving a wedge between Calhoun and Jackson. Van Buren, being the incredibly wily political creature he was, neatly sidestepped it by refusing to have anything to do with the conflict. When Jackson tried to get van Buren to read some of the letters being sent to Jackson, van Buren declined, saying he needed plausible deniability (not in those words, but that’s what he meant). And Jackson agreed with van Buren. Van Buren’s political nickname was The Magician. Because he was exceptionally good at reading the winds and directing traffic to victory after victory. Including for himself.

After resigning as Secretary of State, van Buren boards a boat to England, expecting so spend a year or so as minister there. And he was well received, making the rounds, and certainly effective. While there was not much for him to do at this time, having already negotiated the opening of ports with England while he was secretary of state, he did negotiate compensation for a ship that had come aground in a British port. The ship had been a slave ship and the British refused to hand the cargo over, being that Britain did not support slavery. But van Buren negotiated compensation with the owner of the ship, and everyone was happy. King William IV and the queen quite like van Buren, inviting him to dinner and treating him like family. Then in either late December 1831 or early January 1832, he received word that his posting had not been confirmed by Congress. He immediately presented himself and his regrets to the King and Queen, who were gracious in the situation, before doing a quick tour of Europe and returning home to the United States.

At this point, there wasn’t much for van Buren to do but wait and prep to electioneer his position as VP in the 1832 election. Which he did, quite handily. And as VP, he was able to reign in Jackson’s nationalistic tendencies, pulling him back on the Force Bill, which while passed, was thankfully not used, and continuing to walk that knife edge between states rights, and Jackson’s nationalism.

And Jackson made it clear that he wanted van Buren as his successor in 1836. The 1836 election saw the finalization of the two-party system van Buren had worked so hard to reinstitute, with the Democrats on one side, and the Whig party rising up as opposition. The 1836 election was also where dirty politics made a true resurgence. It had already started with the Jackson/Adams run in 1828. But here, the Whigs viciously attacked van Buren, accusing him of being too effeminate, of being an abolitionist (trying to divide the Southern support), of being pro-banking, pro-nationalist…everything van Buren was most decidedly not. Van Buren let the Democratic war machine fire up, and in an interesting twist, rather than define all the things van Buren DID stand for, the party highlighted what the party stood for. And really that’s all they had, as van Buren was so careful with his politicking, that no one really knew what he stood for. He was a highly qualified and immensely capable politician, always careful to not say to definitively what he meant, always hedging his bets, and leaving himself wiggle room on the translation of intent.

This entire section of the book was dedicated to showing the twists and turns van Buren took to walk that tightrope between saying what needed to be said, and what people wanted to hear. And he was quite adept at this, never actually committing himself in any way that might come back to bite him in the political butt. And in this respect, van Buren was the consummate politician.

And he won, of course, in 1836, allowing Jackson to retire, and taking as his vice president US House of Representative from Kentucky, Richard Mentor Johnson. Johnson was an interesting pick because he was not at all accepted by the Southern states. Unusual, given that he was also from a southern state, but his rejection was for doing openly what the southern landowners did privately. He openly kept a mulatto mistress, and openly had children by her. Ok to do in private but should never be flaunted publicly. From a southern standpoint, at least Jefferson left his mistress and children at home, and never talked about it publicly. But we’ll see how Johnson plays out as VP in the next section.

Well, VP Johnson is mentioned exactly once in parts 4 and 5, so I will give author Donald B Cole absolute kudos for staying on topic throughout the book.

Martin van Buren was sworn into office on March 4, 1837, and just about a month in to office, he had to deal with a legacy problem from Jackson, the problem that would basically define his presidency, due to van Buren’s own shortsightedness and inability to see the forest for the metaphorical trees. The tree he focused on was a financial panic, brought about largely due to Jackson’s outgoing executive order that public lands being sold could only be purchased using actual specie.

What does this mean? Part of the funding to pay off the national debt was achieved by the sale of land owned by the federal government to private individuals. This is largely why states like Ohio are almost entirely privately owned. Only Jackson determined that the buyers could only buy with actual gold or silver coins, not paper money. Because paper money, it turns out, is just paper.

Interestingly, this seems to be the one thing Jackson got right. And van Buren was determined to cling to it. So that was the crux, but what actually happened?

Between 1834 and 1836, the sale of federal lands resulted in a treasury surplus of $16,000,000. Since the budget was now balanced and the federal debts paid, this actually left Jackson in a bit of a panic, as the money would then be distributed to the states for internal improvement. Jackson was sure the states would turn around and loan that money to private speculators. Since the loans would be in paper money and credit, Jackson sought to circumvent this by declaring purchase of public lands must be made in gold or silver, and the this the infamous Specie Circular was published. The banks reacted by calling due all loans, and a panic, and eventual financial depression ensued.

The banks tried to force van Buren to cancel the Specie Circular, which he could absolutely do as president, since this was not a law, only an executive order. But van Buren held tight and refused to cancel out the order with one of his own. In fact, his whole presidency seemed to be about maintaining Jackson’s status quo. On van Buren’s inauguration day, a prominent trading firm run by Isaac Hone stopped making payments, and a few days later, cotton houses in New Orleans began failing.

Due to the just ending boom cycle of the economy, imports from England were greater than exports from the United States. With the trading houses no longer making payments, England demanded that bills paid for imports also be paid in gold or silver. Which contributed to the panic and depression. This caused banks to call all loans due immediately. Which could then not be paid by creditor’s, due to the loans were made using paper money, and what was due was…gold or silver. Real estate values plummeted…. see, American’s never learn. They don’t teach history in school. Hell, this is just like 2008…which is just like 2021….

But seriously, van Buren was just…holding the line. And he was not wrong. The people didn’t see it that way, of course. Why would they? We don’t teach economics any more than we teach history in school. But paper money is just paper. Gold and silver have actual value. Van Buren’s response to all of this was to try and push through an independent treasury, and this is what he spent basically his entire presidential term dealing with. The Panic. And trying to create an independent treasury. He completely ignored the rising calls for abolition of slavery and thought the Trail of Tears was humanely handled…seriously.

On September 5 of 1837, van Buren addressed both houses of Congress through written communication, wherein he pointed out that the Deposit-Distribution Act of 1836 required the Secretary of the Treasury to stop using banks that “refused to redeem their notes in specie.” Basically, the Deposit-Distribution Act upheld a gold standard. It was WHY paper money had any value at all. It said this note worth $5, can be redeemed for $5 in gold coins (or silver). And any bank that did not pony up the cash on request was no longer eligible to do business with the federal government. The specie circular extended that to land transactions, to make sure the government didn’t end up with a pile of paper and no land to show for it.

And van Buren correctly pointed out that by deviating from this value backed currency, we had inflation, due to money invested in lands was a temporarily unproductive investment due to there is no increase in real goods as a result of this. And then he pushed for an independent treasury. He did eventually get his independent treasury, after four years of wheeling and dealing, making friends out of former enemies to do it. But it did cost him that election.

Seriously, it stalemated in congress for the remainder of his term, due to party politics. Seriously. The man wanted a two-party system that put party over principal. Well, he got it. And it bogged his presidency down to the point that he failed to win a second term, losing out to William Henry Harrison in 1840.

And with that, he seemed content to retire to upstate New York, where he had purchased the home of one of the formerly wealthy elites in his hometown, which he found immensely satisfying. But he didn’t quite retire. In fact, he made two more attempts at presidency, one half-hearted in 1844, when he lost the Democratic nomination to James K. Polk, and again in 1848 when he ran on the independent Free-Soil ticket, before withdrawing back to the partisan world of the Democratic party.

He lived out the rest of his life at his home Lindenwald in Kinderhook, NY. I don’t want to say he was a do-nothing person, only that he was a do-nothing president. He certainly had his opinions on slavery, which he supported as an institution when building up the democratic party, but eventually rejected as a candidate for the Free-Soil party. He did not think we should annex Texas, believing that would lead to war with Mexico, and he made sure to maintain American neutrality when Canada made a half-hearted bid for independence from England. But following his retirement from the White House, the politician who had been know to his friends as The Magician pulled his greatest magic trick of all and disappeared from history. His lasting contribution, for which no one seems to know who to blame, is the current two party clusterfuck that is 21st century American politics.

He died on July 24, 1862, having cast his last vote in 1860 for Stephen Douglas. He was survived by three of his four sons, his third born Martin having also died of consumption several years previously.

This book was initially reviewed on YouTube on November 28, 2021, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.