by Ted Widmer
Van Buren was also our first president (and our last, save Kennedy) without a trace of Anglo-Saxon bloodlines. In our putative nation of nations, every other president has come from an English-speaking household, and rather high English at that. Van Buren grew up speaking Dutch, a relic of the time before the Revolution when the inland waterways of North America were a polyglot blend of non-Anglophone communities. His family had resisted intermarriage with Yankees for five generations, and Van Buren trumpeted the fact proudly in his autobiography. In fact, the clannish Van Burens had married each other to avoid diluting the mix. He would seem a little foreign all his life.
But it is perhaps unwise to focus exclusively on the presidency, as Van Buren and so many of his rivals did. Yes, that is the reason this book is being written—because Van Buren happened to occupy the Executive Mansion between 1837 and 1841, and therefore earned a place in this series. But his lasting importance lies elsewhere, in his contribution to the delicate and sometimes not-so-delicate machinery of the American political system. Between the Revolution that created our nation and the Civil War that tested and strengthened it, an elaborate mechanism was created to put the theoretical ideas of the founders into everyday, working practice. It involved some obvious steps forward, such as enlarging the suffrage (between 1824 and 1840, the bookends of Van Buren’s federal career, the number of voters increased from 400,000 to 2.4 million). And it involved old-fashioned, brutal political warfare, including the creation of a new party and the application of political muscle to ensure the party’s survival.
More than any other American, Van Buren helped to create this new democratic mechanism. In varying degrees, he shaped the invention of the party caucus, the nominating convention, the patronage system, the publicity network, and the Democratic Party itself. When the party came into existence in the mid-1820s, it signaled a radical departure from American history to that point. The founders had deplored the idea of “faction,” and Jefferson had tried to cloak his counterinsurgency as a return to original principles. With Van Buren, it was different—the party was celebrated as a legitimate end in itself. More than just any end, it grew into a disciplined organization to rival any corporation in America. More than just an organization, it was a movement, perhaps even a religion.
Van Buren was the general manager and apostle of this unprecedented entity. He spoke a new dialect for the new men of the nineteenth century, a dialect that had not yet been spoken in America, but which has been spoken at a loud volume ever since. For his boldness, he earned the contempt of his enemies, most of whom still believed in a world where landowning gentry controlled the destinies of their dependents, and opposition was tantamount to disobedience. Now and then, he earned their contempt, for he played the game of politics with as much ferocity as any of his rivals. But he deserves our grudging respect for his vision of a modern political system that allowed democracy to grow beyond the founding documents into something tangible for millions of disenfranchised Americans.
Van Buren lacked Webster’s eloquence, or Calhoun’s fire, or Benton’s physical presence, but his political vision exceeded anyone’s of his generation. He saw the shifting demographics that were ultimately going to give the urban North more power than the plantation South. He saw that New York, as it gained electoral strength, would no longer need to take a backseat to the squires of Virginia, who viewed the White House as yet another plantation along the Potomac. He saw the emptiness of the temporary alliances that dominated politics during the so-called Era of Good Feelings, and perceived the need for a great party, built around a New York–Virginia axis, but open to restless young men from all regions, that would harness their energy and transform American politics forever.
The idea was borrowed from his two mentors, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, who had joined forces in 1800, but Van Buren was able to build a far more enduring alliance than the fusion of two combustible elements like Burr and Jefferson would ever achieve. Van Buren’s North-South base, drawing on well-run state operations with like-minded operators, was not so different from the model that would be built a century later by his distant kinsman and fellow Knickerbocker Franklin Roosevelt. He used it to win the presidency, and then, in one of those reversals that periodically turn American politics into Greek tragedy, he nearly destroyed what he had built with the first major third-party campaign in American history, the Free Soil movement of 1848. In that quixotic effort, he resembled no one so much as his other presidential kinsman Theodore Roosevelt. He did all that, and he helped to popularize the most useful word in world history, if indeed it is a word: OK. Can any president claim a more pervasive legacy?
It is still hard for us to believe, as it was for his contemporaries. There was something in Van Buren’s appearance that struck observers as vaguely wrong. It was not merely that he was short and bald, or that he grew those foppish sideburns that seemed to widen his body by several inches in the wrong direction. Something in his very being enraged his enemies, and he was never able to persuade them that he was the legitimate heir to Jackson, even after he had won the White House. They savaged him with burlesques and cartoons and speeches on the floor of Congress, hinting that he wore a corset and drawing dark inferences about the Madeira he drank and the fine china he ordered for state dinners. It was widely whispered that he was the bastard progeny of Aaron Burr—a terrible slur in 1827, the year that John Quincy Adams rapturously wrote the gossip in his diary.
All this innuendo was even more unlikely given the relative poverty of Van Buren’s upbringing—an indigence exceeded only by Jackson and Lincoln among the early presidents, and not matched by too many since. He is one of only two men elected president without the benefit of military service or a college education (Grover Cleveland is the other). But his humble background was one of the reasons his enemies disdained him, while also attacking the urbane tastes he had cultivated to mask his modest origin. With some enemies, you just can’t win. Like almost every Democratic president since then, his enjoyment of life was twisted by his critics into hypocrisy and selfishness, and proof that his form of democracy was insincere—the bulk of the criticism coming, of course, from the most abject defenders of the status quo.
Not all his shortcomings were exaggerated. Some were even underappreciated. Like every politician in the antebellum, he failed to confront the ticking time bomb of slavery. Or to be more specific, he neglected it when he could have done something, ahead of the pack, and turned to it only late in his career, with mixed results. Slavery was not just a moral crisis; it was a political problem of the highest magnitude, and as a clairvoyant party boss he should have seen it coming. But the fact that Southerners thought him pro-northern and Northerners thought him pro-southern conveys something of the delicacy of his predicament. It is true, as Dante wrote, that the hottest circles of hell are reserved for those who, in a time of crisis, preserve their neutrality. But to have been braver and wiser in 1837 would almost certainly have doomed him to political irrelevance. The nation was not yet ready—not even close (part of Lincoln’s genius is that he arrived at a moment when it was possible to become Lincoln). Like most Jacksonians, Van Buren tilted at windmills and lunged at chimeras, consumed by the “monster” of the Bank while ignoring the genuine monster nursing at America’s bosom.
It is also true that he was ambitious and calculating. Are there any presidents who were not? Jefferson? Please. Lincoln? TR? FDR? You must be joking. Van Buren did hire cronies, as all presidents have, and fired more of his rivals’ appointees than was customary at the time. He could be a ruthless infighter. At his best, the Little Magician turned opponents into chumps and made problems vanish into his hat. People like that kind of magic. But was it magic? Or just effective politics, conducted by a virtuoso ahead of his time, using twentieth-century hardball while most of his contemporaries were still playing rounders? In his epic biography of LBJ, a shark whom Van Buren resembles in some respects (though certainly not the physical), Robert Caro discusses the lesser politi
cal arts that matter behind the scene—vote counting, deal making, favorable and unfavorable publicity at just the right moment. Like Johnson, Van Buren understood these pressure points instinctively. It is not the stuff of Young Reader Biographies of Great Americans, but it is, for better or worse, how America works.
His mastery of these invisible skills may explain why so much power seemed to flow to him, without apparent exertion. The caustic Virginian John Randolph of Roanoke wrote that he “rowed to his object with muffled oars.” Time after time, his opponents sensed his presence at the levers of the mechanism, throwing switches and adjusting gear ratios to make the system hum. They never understood how he had arrived at his knowledge so effortlessly, without the blustery speeches and rodomontades that defined political fame for those living in the eighteenth century, as so many Americans still were in the early republic. Van Buren resembled one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fictitious scientists—Ethan Brand or Roger Chillingsworth—who mysteriously acquire a forbidden knowledge of the dark arts, emblematic of the great industrial changes altering Puritan New England forever. A little magician, indeed.
But many of the charges against Van Buren were unfounded. One of the most serious is that he refused to take a stand on the issues, that he was too “Van Burenish,” to use an adjective of the day. He rather enjoyed the reputation—in his autobiography, he relished the story of two men who heard him speak on the tariff and afterward praised him profusely for his eloquent argument. After a brief pause, one of them then asked him sheepishly which side of the great question his speech had defended.
After examining the evidence, I find no reason to believe that he failed to speak and act on important problems. He did, over and over again. Not always in the way that we would like him to, from our pitch-perfect perspective. But still, he made hard decisions, and he generally made them well. From early adulthood onward, he made a series of brave commitments to the cause of democracy, both in his legal career defending small tenants against the great landlords of the Hudson Valley and in politics. Each time, he was severely rebuked by the wealthy patrons who tried to enlist him in their narrow causes. Each time, he overcame the insults and outdistanced his would-be protectors, which enraged them all the more. One of his most courageous decisions was his refusal to join the stampede for admitting Texas, with all of its slave territory, into the union. It cost him the presidency and he knew it, but he stuck to his guns.
* * *
I want in this book to bring Martin Van Buren back from the dead, because he is important. In so doing, I want to steer a middle course between the partisans who tried to lift Van Buren’s pudgy frame into the pantheon—an effort that collapsed under the weight of its absurdity—and his legions of character assassins, who wanted the world to see him through their inverted binoculars. After a century and a half of neglect, Van Buren deserves some attention, and some accuracy as well.
In so doing, I want to show how much effort and emotion is invested in any presidency—not merely the gargantuan political struggles that lead to and then undo an administration, but the simple life of the republic over any four years in our history. I want to show how much of American history belongs to people whose names we cannot remember—not just Van Buren, but the tens of thousands of nameless coopers and cordwainers and field hands who spoke through him, in all of their languages.
It is easy to minimize the importance of a single-term presidency, especially when that term contains a disaster. Let’s face it, depression presidents are, for lack of a better word, depressing. Like Herbert Hoover, like George H. W. Bush, like James Buchanan, Van Buren had the bad luck to be a one-term president in punishing times. The Panic of 1837 was the worst economic crisis to date in American history. It sent shudders around the world, proving how global the American economy had already become.
But that does not mean those four years were insignificant. On the contrary, something essential happened between 1837 and 1841. It was a hinge of history—one of those moments when a door latch silently clicks open and the mood of a nation changes ineffably. Virginia Woolf wrote, “on or about December 1910, human character changed.” For all its frustration, Van Buren’s tenure was no less pivotal.
How rich those depression years were! Americans were caught vertiginously between the feeling that something was ending and something very new was beginning. The oldest of the revolutionaries were dying off—James Madison in June 1836 (six days short of the fourth of July—a pity), Aaron Burr in September of the same year, on the eve of seeing his protégé elected. Sally Hemings had died a year earlier, though few noticed. In the late 1830s, the body of George Washington was removed from its coffin and placed in a marble sarcophagus, and this macabre newspaper account reveals how intensely dependent Americans still were on the revolutionary past that was slipping from their fingers:
GENERAL WASHINGTON.—The remains of this illustrious man, the Father and Saviour of his country, were recently placed in the sarcophagus made by Mr. Struthers of this city, from whom we learn that, when the vault and coffin were opened ‘where they had lain him,’ the sacred form of Washington was discovered in a wonderful state of preservation. The high pale brow wore a calm and serene expression; and the lips, pressed still together, had a grave and solemn smile, such as they doubtless wore when the first president gave up his mortal life for an immortal existence; ‘When his soft breath, with pain, was yielded to the elements again.’ The impressive aspect of the great departed overpowered the man whose lot it was to transfer the hallowed dust to its last tenement, and he was unable to conceal his emotions. He placed his hand upon the ample forehead, once highest in the ranks of battle, or throbbing with the cares of the infant empire, and he lamented, we doubt not, that the voice of fame could not provoke that silent clay to life again, or pour its tones of revival into the dull cold ear of death.
But the times were startlingly modern as well. What wasn’t invented in the 1830s? The railroad hurtled through American lives at sickening speeds up to thirty miles an hour, and tracks spread like spiderwebs across the landscape (the United States boasted 2,816 miles of tracks in 1840, up from 23 in 1830, and well ahead of Britain’s 1,331 miles). The first daguerreotypes captured light and reality as no painter ever could (the earliest American example, from September 1839, showed a blurry church near Washington Square in New York). Samuel Morse, one of the first American photographers, was getting ready to unveil his new telegraph. Charles Goodyear stumbled across the formula for vulcanized rubber, perhaps winning World War II for the Allies by doing so. The Hoe type revolutionized the printed word, leading to the mass printing of newspapers and the creation of modern journalism. The list goes on and on. It was, in short, the birth of modernity. John D. Rockefeller, born in Richford, New York, on July 8, 1839, lived until 1937, within the lifetime of Elvis Presley.
An extraordinary number of foreign travelers visited America in the 1830s, sensing that the future of the world was being enacted here. Tocqueville’s books came out in 1835 and 1840; he was followed by scores of imitators from across Europe, but especially from England, now waking up to the brawn of its bastard stepchild. Americans, too, caught the fever. In 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson stood up and announced that America no longer needed Europe; his speech was called America’s declaration of literary independence. At nearly the same moment, young men across the land aggressively claimed their destinies. In Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln gave his first major speech, announcing that one generation had passed and it was time for a new generation to take charge. In Hudson, Ohio, John Brown experienced an epiphany and stood up in the back of a prayer meeting to announce that he was ready to destroy slavery by any means necessary. In Baltimore, a young slave named Frederick Bailey formed a secret debating club, the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society, to debate the ethics of bondage with a circle of white friends—a step toward his escape a year later and his reinvention as Frederick Douglass.
As these young Americans found themselves, the
nation swelled with the daily arrival of ever-growing numbers of immigrants, perhaps moved by the grand talk about freedom, but more likely just looking for a home. The 1840 census showed that Thomas Jefferson’s simple agrarian republic now had almost 17 million people. New York City alone had three hundred thousand people. That figure would give Calhoun nightmares—Calhoun who had resisted the rise of Van Buren since he first came to Washington, hoping to perpetuate his sinister vision of a slave-based republic, and now helpless before the onslaught of humanity coming across the Atlantic, to Van Buren’s North. Their rivalry, containing the seeds of the internecine conflict to come, bears more scrutiny than historians have accorded it.
It is perhaps this aspect of the four years that is most noteworthy. Between 1837 and 1841, it became clear to sentient observers that an apocalyptic battle was looming between North and South; or, more accurately, between Union and Slavery—a struggle that would dwarf the acrimonious debates over economic policy that had dominated the previous decade. The shelves of New England libraries bulge with tracts from the late 1830s attacking the peculiar institution. The South was equally recalcitrant, passing a gag rule in the House that prevented any resolutions treating the subject of slavery—an outrageous violation of free speech. The storm was still two decades off, but its headwinds were already blowing fiercely.
These were hard facts for Americans to accept. They were then, as now, deeply patriotic about their past, and perhaps even more so about their future. There was a mania for new utopian schemes, from religious revivalism to bizarre cults like the followers of Sylvester Graham, who believed that cold showers, hard mattresses, a diet of rough fiber (he invented the graham cracker), and abstention from sex would lead to a healthy life and afterlife. Graham was once nearly drawn and quartered by a mob of butchers in Boston after complaining that raw meat, if looked at the right way, could arouse impure thoughts.