by Ted Widmer
Between 1837 and 1841, Americans encountered three important reality checks that suddenly made the future less appetizing. The Panic of 1837 taught that capitalism was fallible. The Log Cabin campaign of 1840, with its false promises and hard cider entreaties, taught that democracy was fallible. And rising rage over slavery taught that the Union itself was fallible. After years of thinking that they were uniquely virtuous and that God had smiled on the American republic (the perfectly scripted Fourth of July exits of Jefferson and Adams proved it), Americans had some real problems on their hands.
In other words, Van Buren had his work cut out for him as president. It would take an extremely imaginative biographer to claim that he succeeded; it is less Van Burenish to call his presidency a disaster and leave it at that. But I would like to suggest that it was a more interesting disaster than most. His failures showed how difficult it was to assemble a democratic coalition in the face of withering pressure from economic chaos, regional discord, and the conservative enemies who never gave him a moment’s peace. His successes, rare though they were, showed an evolving sense of government’s role in strengthening what Van Buren called “the Democracy”—not just the party, but the entire people (at least the people who were not female, African, or Native American). All told, his turmoil deepens our astonishment that the tiny government created by a small cluster of gentlemen in Philadelphia in 1787 not only survived intact, but grew into the most powerful human force on earth.
It certainly was not written on a stone tablet that things were going to turn out this way. In fact, when Van Buren died after a long tenure as ex-president (the fifth-longest after Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, John Adams, and Jimmy Carter), the future could not have looked darker. Van Buren, a child of the Revolution, expired on July 24, 1862, with no sign that the end of the war was in sight, his party and country in tatters.
But perhaps he did not despair. He had faced adversity over and over again, and survived everything that life and politics threw at him. His sunny disposition never faltered, at least not in public. He knew a crucial American fact, one that still drives Europeans crazy: optimism breeds optimism, and relentless good cheer, even when artificial, can turn a rout into a strategic retreat. He may have known that, in the very month he died, Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act (laying the foundation for our great state universities), the Pacific Railroad Act, and presented the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. That fundamental belief in the future—so bold as to almost constitute effrontery—would have warmed Van Buren’s heart.
Martin Van Buren had always cared about the future—he boasted in his inaugural that he was the first president born after independence, and insisted that “I belong to a later age.” In certain ways, he had brought the future into existence, removing the old-fashioned politicians who failed to get it and helping America grow from infancy into something like adolescence—a perfect word to convey the turbulent mood swings, lingering pustules of animosity, and general bad hair of the Van Buren era.
He deserves to be reconnected to that future—to us. Not falsely praised—he would not want that. Well, all right, he would. Rather, Van Buren’s life should be honestly reexamined for the truths of his own time and ours. A grand total of six American communities were named after him, presumably during his brief moment in the sun, in Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, and Ohio. Their combined population adds up to about ten thousand people, far more than have ever read a book about him. After all that he lived through, he deserves more. Perhaps this profile will begin the process of explaining him more fully, expanding upon the effort he began alongside the Mediterranean, with the Sirens singing their entreaties and Clio whispering in his ear.
1
Kinderhook
Legend has it that Martin Van Buren was once received at a royal reception by Queen Adelaide of the Netherlands. Before a crowd of courtiers and swells, she politely asked the distinguished Dutch-American how far back he could trace his ancestry. Van Buren bowed deeply and responded, “As far back as Kinderhook, Your Majesty.” That was vintage Van Buren, saying everything and nothing at once.
To begin to peel back Van Buren’s mysteries, there is no more logical place to start than his hometown. Kinderhook is located in Columbia County, New York, on the east bank of the Hudson, twenty miles south of Albany. Like all hometowns, it is far more than a destination to be casually entered into a Yahoo! search engine. For Van Buren, it was the opposite of a terminus—it was a place of origin, and for most of his forebears, the sum and circumference of geographical knowledge. In other words, it was a place to be left behind.
Today’s Kinderhook is a charming village, eager to promote its link to the Dutch past and to its two celebrities, Van Buren and Washington Irving. It boasts the usual saintly relics associated with medieval pilgrimages, including Van Buren’s fine china toilet, one of the first such contrivances installed in a private residence in the United States, and its curio shops and bed-and-breakfasts ooze quaintness. To be sure, it is as lovely a place to escape to as from. Like other small seats of presidential aspiration—say, Plymouth, Vermont (pop. 440), or West Branch, Iowa (pop. 1,908), or Plains, Georgia (pop. 716)—it inspires with the notion that anyone from anywhere can become the leader of the world’s most powerful nation.
But there is more to Kinderhook (pop. 1,293) than just careful scenery. Like all old towns in the postindustrial North, it has tired neighborhoods at the periphery, marginal in every sense. The Salvation Army is doing a thriving business, as are a couple of auto body shops, the Shear Magic Hair Salon, and an Off-Track Betting facility. Along the highways leading in and out of town are the careworn signs of roadside capitalism we routinely drive by without much noticing: AKC BEAGLES 4 SALE, or, even more economically, BAIT. The would-be Irving, eager to paint Kinderhook as an eighteenth-century Dutch movie set, does so at his peril. Real people live here.
In fact, Kinderhook’s quaintness was earned the hard way. Throughout its early history, it witnessed one political struggle after another, usually pitting the landed gentry whose mansions dot the upper Hudson like so many navigational beacons against the regular folks who also happened to live here. More than most towns on the upper Hudson, Kinderhook emerged as an island of two-party democracy in a region that was at that time anything but democratic. The first clue to its identity lies in its location at a desirable wide spot on the Hudson, where a creek flows in from the east. Local histories claim that this was the place where Henry Hudson, after traveling across the Atlantic and up the great river, decided he’d seen enough of America and turned the Half Moon around, headed for home. Writing of Hudson’s U-turn, a wordy antiquarian called Kinderhook “the Ultima Thule of his personal explorations and the Ne Plus Ultra of his desires.” That is too poetic for most stomachs, but it comes as no surprise to learn that the favorable location soon turned into a bustling little port, and that its numbers grew as the Dutch poured into the Hudson Valley in the seventeenth century.
But like any real estate story, the key to Kinderhook’s story is location (there is still a Van Buren Realty at the center of town). This precise spot was one of the few places on the upper Hudson that fell outside the great manorial tracts given to the great patroons—the enormously wealthy seventeenth-century landholders who controlled giant tracts of land as if they were feudal lords, which they were. Paradoxically, the Hudson Valley, future home to stalwart Democrats like Van Buren and FDR, was one of the least democratic regions in colonial America. The mighty Van Rensselaers owned a sprawling entity known as Rensselaerswyck, three-quarters of a million acres in Columbia, Albany, and Rensselaer counties; the equally baronial Livingstons claimed 250,000 acres in Columbia County.
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Yet Americans have a way of overpowering—or, better yet, ignoring—the moldy parchments written in secret chambers in Europe. The settlers who came to Kinderhook had little patience for these claims, some of which exceeded the size of entire European nations
, and all of which were vague and difficult to enforce. As a result, this particular zone of democracy along the Hudson attracted numerous citizens who prized freedom from authority. Soon, roads were linking this favored spot to the other clusters of semi-Americans living in the region. “The Great New England Path” had once brought Native Americans from Massachusetts, and grew into an important colonial highway connecting Kinderhook to Albany in one direction and Boston and New York in the other.
Naturally, these axial roads drew travelers, lawyers, and other miscreants populating the eighteenth-century landscape. The pace quickened in the aftermath of the French and Indian War, which had opened up vast reaches of New York’s hinterland, and the American Revolution, which did more of the same. Travelers streamed over the highway from the east, eager to start something better in the new world that always lay just over the horizon. Many tarried for a night or two in a modest tavern run by the easygoing Abraham Van Buren. And it was here, on December 5, 1782, that Martin Van Buren entered the world, literally born to the bosom of politics, for his father’s tavern doubled as the local polling place at election time.
At first, there was precious little to indicate that the infant would merit the future interest of historians. The first Van Burens had slouched toward Kinderhook in 1631 after a long journey from Holland. The progenitor, Cornelis, did not even have a proper last name, so his son Marten added the Van Buren (being thousands of miles from the old country made a distinguished lineage that much easier to fabricate). They were joined by neighbors and cousins—more or less one and the same—and discovered an early form of the American Dream, defined as agriculture and the creation of more Van Burens. If the myth is that Americans are always on the move, always improving themselves, there was little in the Van Buren saga to support it. For a century and a half, they stayed exactly where they were—close to the land and close to each other. Like characters in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, they regenerated themselves across the centuries, oblivious to the upheavals happening around them. Kinderhook was as inbred as any island, and more than a few Van Burens married their kin, including Van Buren’s father and grandfather. In his autobiography, the future president boasted with a Bosnian insularity: “My family was from Holland, without a single intermarriage with one of different extraction from the time of the arrival of the first emigrant to that of the marriage of my eldest son, embracing a period of over two centuries and including six generations.”
You can get a pretty good idea of life in old Kinderhook by looking at any Dutch genre painting of the seventeenth century—families sitting around the hearth, cows lowing in the fields, young men and women flirting in the shadows. It was a world that Vermeer would have instantly recognized—the sleepy town rising and setting with the sun, and following the same harvest rhythms of any farm community. Authority flowed lazily downward from the local gentry, like a mountain stream. Information was spread through conversation and eavesdropping, and outsiders were distrusted. In the 1780s, after some farm animals disappeared, a local rumor blamed a wild, mixed-race family of blacks, whites, and Indians, all named Johnston, who allegedly lived in little huts in the Pine Woods outside of town, and allowed illicit relations between brother and sister. Like their neighbors, the Van Burens—all seven families with that name—spoke furtively in Dutch to one another, attended the Dutch Reformed Church, and prayed to a Dutch God. Those who were not Van Burens were more than likely to be Van Alens, Van Nesses, or Van Schaacks. Washington Irving was captivated by these aspects of Kinderhook during his stay there, and in turn captured some of it in his writing—the low-roofed dwelling, the spreading sycamore, the henpecked husband sneaking out of earshot for a dram.
In many ways, Abraham Van Buren was the embodiment of an Irving character—a bit careless about money, and not the most eager young man to settle down with a wife. In fact, he was thirty-nine by the time that he surrendered his independence in, of all years, 1776. That year he married Maria Hoes Van Alen, a widow with three children. There is some evidence that she completes the Irving profile as a sturdy, self-reliant housewife, not one to suffer fools gladly, although in truth very little is known about this crucial formative influence on the future president. She bore two more children to Van Buren before Martin was born, five days before a provisional treaty was signed ending the war. Three more children would follow, giving Martin eight siblings, spread out evenly around him. It was a middling debut in every sense.
The Van Burens belonged utterly to the social organism of Kinderhook, and yet their status in the hierarchy was mediocre at best. Like a quarter of Kinderhookers, Abraham owned slaves—six of them. This was not as unusual as it sounds (New York would not abolish slavery until 1827) but still, the fact does not square easily with Van Buren’s future as a defender of small freeholds. Yet this was no tidewater mansion. The one-and-a-half-story wooden tavern housed not only its paying customers, but the sixteen Van Buren dependents, white and black. How the occupants of this strange multiracial condominium coexisted we can only guess at dimly, and most historians have preferred to remain mute on the subject. There is no evidence that Van Buren, the first and last northern president to know slavery up close, felt either a deep revulsion toward the peculiar institution or the remotest desire to save it. More than anything, it seems that he wanted to leave this overcrowded household, reeking of inefficiency and indigence, in the past where it belonged—and that may be as close to an antislavery argument as he ever got.
Clearly, there was a great distance between this crowded household and the manorial dwellings dominating the vast patroonships of the Hudson Valley. Perhaps for this reason, Abraham Van Buren identified with the democratic hopes of the new era.
There is precious little information on either parent in the slender campaign biographies that began to accompany Van Buren’s presidential stirrings in the 1830s, but what there is is illuminating. The elder Van Buren was “a whig in the Revolution, an anti-federalist in 1788, and an early supporter of Jefferson.” There is the hint of something more than indolence in that sentence—a genuine political feeling that was translated from father to son.
In his autobiography, Van Buren reveals just how far removed from the center of Kinderhook his father’s little tavern really was. An unfamiliar wounded tone crept in when he remembered the grandees of Columbia County, his awe at their great “reputation and distinction,” and his difficulty at proving his worth to a society that was still more democratic in name than in spirit. For all his parents’ economies, they struggled for their meager existence. Van Buren damned his father with faint praise as “an unassuming amiable man … utterly devoid of the spirit of accumulation.” Worse, “his property, originally moderate, was gradually reduced until he could but illy afford to bestow the necessary means upon the education of his children.” That tone of anger, from the talented son of a second marriage, wondering about his place in the world, and surrounded on all sides by oafish conformity, would later fuel suspicions about Van Buren’s parentage.
And yet, a tavern was not such a dismal place to grow up for a young boy with a head for politics. Here the locals aired their grievances and gossip. The mail came, as did travelers bearing important dispatches between Albany and the city growing recklessly at the mouth of the Hudson. Political leaders came as well, including the most charismatic of all New York Republicans, Aaron Burr. Inevitably, these impressions acted as an incubator on the sensitive political intelligence growing inside the tavern walls. Like young Dick Nixon in his father’s service station in Whittier, California, or Jimmy Carter in his father’s general store in Plains, or Bill Clinton in his grandfather’s store in a mixed-race part of Hope, Arkansas, Martin Van Buren absorbed it all.
And what gossip there was in those days! Five years before his birth, the great battle of Saratoga, just upriver, had brought the rebels their first important victory. Three years later, in the opposite direction, the lower Hudson witnessed the excitement over Benedict Arnold’s attempt to surren
der West Point to Major John Andre. When Van Buren was born, George Washington was at Newburgh, not far from West Point, and the British did not finally evacuate New York until he was a year old. Van Buren was not only the first president born in the United States, but the only one born to the revolution itself.
For all its rustic calm, Kinderhook was anxious before, during, and after the war. The farmers of Columbia County, historically dominated by the patroons and their toadies, must have felt no little sympathy with the leveling winds unleashed by the revolution. An amusing newspaper account from 1775 reveals that a group of young women, gathered for a quilting bee, tarred and feathered a young man who denounced the cause of liberty in their midst. Aftershocks were felt long after war ended, and Kinderhook was uncomfortably close to the agitation that shook western Massachusetts throughout Shays’s Rebellion in 1786–87.
To the west, as well, were sources of insecurity—not only Native Americans, but a huge and poorly defined expanse of new territory that required new forms of administration and attracted all manner of people to pass through Kinderhook on their way to meet the challenge. It is important to convey a sense of New York’s vastness in the eighteenth century—already an old state, with six generations of Van Burens, but endlessly renewing itself with an incessant stream of empire-builders seeking their fortune in the hinterland. Like Virginia, it was so large that its contours were barely understood—stretching from the Green Mountains of Vermont, not yet a state, to the Great Lakes and the furthest inland reaches of North American settlement. Western and eastern; urban, rural, and pristine; New York’s limitless future lay before it like a clearing in the forest, about to be lined with iron rails.