by Ted Widmer
But if Kinderhook was backward in some senses, it was not entirely isolated either. Its location on the river and the roads meant that the little hub was perfectly situated to harness the tidal wave of energies released by the end of the war. In the same year that Van Buren was born, Congress had adopted a Great Seal with the motto Novus Ordo Seclorum (And So Begins a New Order for the Ages). Americans took Congress at its word. They began to build a new country before the ink on the treaties was dry.
Historians tell us that capital, both the word and the thing, appeared around 1800 in the upper Hudson Valley, as speculators subsidized new businesses and reaped huge profits for their confidence in others. New enterprises sprang up—near Kinderhook, Yankees from New England created the town of Hudson in 1783, and before long it had a thriving whaling business, hundreds of miles from the Atlantic Ocean! The old, familiar rhythms of agricultural life gave way to a new celerity—new men with new attitudes, less inclined to mumble deferentially before their betters, and eager to enjoy life on their own terms. Time and information were of the essence, so people bought watches and read newspapers. Their energy crackled like electricity along the roads connecting Albany to New York and Boston. Some of it, by extension, found its way into the little tavern.
Van Buren was a quick study. In his own words, he possessed “an uncommonly active mind,” and he was sent to the local one-room schoolhouse. But owing to his father’s pecuniary embarrassment, he left school at thirteen. An acute consciousness of what he gave up pervades his writing. In his autobiography, he bemoans his lack of reading, and writes, “I am now amazed that with such disadvantages I should have been able to pass through such contests as it has been my lot to encounter with so few discomfitures. Much adroitness was often necessary to avoid appearing in debate until I had been able to make myself master of the subject under discussion.” His lifelong insecurity on this point may be one of the reasons he and Andrew Jackson became such close friends, to the surprise of Van Buren’s better-educated rivals.
If the decision to leave school cost him something, it also brought him closer to the political world that fascinated him. In 1796 Van Buren left home to begin an apprenticeship with the lawyer Francis Silvester, one of Kinderhook’s worthies and, like most of the local gentry, a staunch Federalist. The work was hardly glamorous; in exchange for building a fire every day and sweeping out the office, Van Buren received rudimentary training in the law and a glimpse of life inside the Kinderhook elite.
But several half-remembered anecdotes suggest how long the odds still were against Martin Van Buren. On the first day Van Buren reported to work as an apprentice, according to an old campaign biography, he wore “coarse linen and rough woolens his mother had spun and woven.” This garment became dirtier over the course of the day, doubtless because one of his duties was to clean the office, and his employer objected to his unkempt appearance. At the end of his first day, after a lecture on the importance of wearing the right clothing, Van Buren disappeared for two days and came back wearing the same expensive outfit that Silvester was wearing when he chastised him. He would never be accused of a casual attitude toward clothing again.
Van Buren was also under pressure from his employer to join the dominant Federalist Party. Another early biography claims that the Federalists noticed his great ability, and that they soon “feared as well as hated him,” specifically because his “eloquence at popular meetings in the cause of public rights” filled them with “terror and dismay.” That sounds exaggerated, but still, the ruling party had noticed the young talent in their midst. Most of Kinderhook went Federalist, including Van Buren’s older half brother, and it would have been easy for him to follow them.
In 1798, Silvester’s father won election as a state senator, and all evening the townsfolk celebrated with songs, cannon fire, and copious toasts. It was a defining moment for the fifteen-year-old apprentice. All evening the Silvesters invited him to join them, and he refused, staying in his room. At length, one of them came and sat on his bed. After a long and heartfelt conversation, Van Buren later recalled, “My course had been settled after much reflection, and could not be changed.” His principled stand created bickering and “heart burning” on the part of his master, but he stood his ground. There was nothing noncommittal about it.
The campaign biographies tell us that the story did not end there. In that moment, the vitriolic dislike that followed Van Buren like a miasma began to come into existence: “His character was traduced, his person ridiculed, his principles branded as infamous, his integrity questioned, and his abilities sneered at, by those who had recently extolled them. In short, Mr. Van Buren encountered, in the earliest period of his career, an earnest of that malignant and persevering abuse with which he has been incessantly assailed, from that time to the present.” At a time when the worst that could be said of someone was that he admired the French Revolution, Van Buren was likened to Marat and Robespierre. Hard as it must have been, he never turned back. From that moment forward, Van Buren would be a democrat, and a well-dressed one to boot.
Fortunately, there was another influential family in Kinderhook, and they leaned Jeffersonian. The Van Ness clan included two young brothers, John and William, who took an interest in the young clerk. Van Buren showed early signs of his political abilities by helping John win nomination to Congress at a caucus in nearby Troy, and as his reward he was sent to New York City to live and study with William, an up-and-coming Republican lawyer. He arrived there in 1801, his own destiny tied to the new century and to the Empire City about to explode into existence.
It would have been hard to dream up a better situation for Van Buren. Though young, William Van Ness was an intimate of the great luminary of New York politics, Vice President Aaron Burr, the cynosure of all eyes in those years before the duel at Weehawken. Burr was only forty-five years old in 1801, but he had lived enough for most men. A grandson of Jonathan Edwards; hero of the Revolution; founder of Tammany Hall; and very nearly president after the disputed election of 1800, he was now using his formidable powers of persuasion to line up supporters among the talented young men swarming to New York. Van Ness was one of the chief lieutenants of Burr’s “Little Band”—he would serve as Burr’s second during the fateful duel with Hamilton—and consequently Van Buren was often in the presence of the great man.
These must have been thrilling days for Van Buren—not yet twenty years old, living in Manhattan, savoring the moment when political supremacy tilted away from the Federalists, and through it all, enjoying the attention of the brilliant vice president of the United States, a man he resembled enough to cause tongues to wag. If they were not related, then they certainly enjoyed an ideological kinship. Even fifty years later, Van Buren seemed to relish every glance as he recalled Burr in his memoir: “He treated me with much attention, and my sympathies were excited by his subsequent position.”1
The rumor is worth discussing, not only because rumors can be as significant as facts, but because there is a passing resemblance between the young Van Buren and the rake whispered to be his true father. But is it true? Most scholars have scoffed at the story, but for an implausible reason: because Van Buren’s mother, thirty-five when he was born, with a few kids already, and stuck in a tavern, was presumably unattractive to Burr. Such an assumption assumes that (a) middle-aged women exercise no sex appeal and (b) Aaron Burr only liked women of great beauty. The first assumption is subjective and dangerous, and there is no merit to the second, either.
But having established Burr’s right to enjoy carnal relations with anyone he chose, there are still problems with the theory that he fathered Van Buren. No one seems to have mentioned it until it was harmful to Van Buren’s career. And when push came to shove, Van Buren was not much of an ally to Burr, once again bucking a mentor. In November 1803, Van Buren passed the bar and moved back to Kinderhook to hang out his shingle with his half brother. A few months later, Burr ran for governor of New York as an independent candidate. Despit
e his admiration for Burr, Van Buren cast his vote with the regular nominee of the Republicans, Morgan Lewis. The Van Ness family was apoplectic, and when Van Buren arrived to vote, they publicly challenged his right to vote, an “indignity” he did not forget but which he overlooked several months later when William Van Ness needed legal help to avoid being arrested after the Hamilton-Burr duel. A poignant scene in his memoir describes Van Buren knocking as hard as he can on the door of the Van Ness mansion, and the senior Van Ness refusing to answer the door, but smiling at Van Buren’s audacity. Half a century later, still audacious, Van Buren would buy the Van Ness house outright for himself.
Van Buren was learning that friends could be as difficult as enemies and that politics was a blood sport. He was also gaining a grasp of how the battle was practiced up close. An interesting letter he wrote in 1802 describes a hard-fought election in which the Republicans were nearly outfoxed by the Federalists, whose “wagons were continually going fetching the Lame the blind & the aged to the poll.” Van Buren’s side, needless to add, was “not wanting in activity,” and “not even the Machiavellian arts of Federalism [could] withstand the Irresistible ardor of Freedom of Republicans.” In other words, Van Buren’s side won—probably by fighting even dirtier than their opponents.
Van Buren’s political activity grew alongside his legal career in Kinderhook. Throughout the long presidency of Thomas Jefferson, Van Buren reveled in the spread of democratic principles. Describing this period, a sentence in his memoir hints at how deep-seated his convictions were: “My faith in the capacity of the masses of the People of our Country to govern themselves, and in their general integrity in the exercise of that function, was very decided and was more and more strengthened as my intercourse with them extended.” A contemporary recorded Van Buren’s enthusiasm for Jefferson: “His support of the government was not merely active but zealous; nor was his the zeal of ordinary men. It absorbed his whole soul; it led to untiring exertion; it was exhibited on all occasions and under all circumstances. Neither the contumely of inflated wealth, not the opposition of invidious talent, nor the revilings of a licentious press, could awe it into silence or soften it to moderation.”
In 1807, there were a number of challenges to his worldview. Another bruising election brought out the fissures in the unstable foundation of New York politics. That year, Van Buren supported the regular nominee of his party for governor, the popular Daniel Tompkins—known far and wide as “the Farmer’s Boy.” But once again most of Kinderhook lined up behind personal factions, and there was anger on all sides. A more disciplined party organization was desperately needed.
Van Buren was not yet able to offer that discipline, but he took a dramatic step toward the organization of his personal life in that year. On February 21, 1807, he married Hannah Hoes in Catskill, New York. In the Van Buren family tradition, she was a first cousin once removed (her grandfather was Van Buren’s uncle) and native to Kinderhook. Soon, he would have a growing family along with a growing practice—nine months later, the first of his four sons was born. In the long annals of the presidency, it would be difficult to find a presidential spouse we know less about than Hannah Van Buren. There are no likenesses of her, and she died long before Van Buren was elected. She is not mentioned in the enormous manuscript of his autobiography. Yet there is not the slightest whiff of scandal about their love, and it is telling that he never remarried after her death in 1819.
It was an auspicious time to start a new life with his bride. Later that same year, Robert Fulton’s steamboat Clermont traveled from New York City to Albany in thirty-two hours. The Hudson Valley would never be the same. To get even closer to the water highway and the business it brought, Van Buren moved his practice to the new town of Hudson, just south of Kinderhook. Soon he was making $10,000 a year, and creating a stir as one of the most gifted lawyers in a remarkable constellation of Hudson River attorneys.
We have lost the sense of what the law once stood for to ambitious young men. As the nineteenth century dawned, it still commanded an awe that transcended the political realm. Lawyers were the priests of a secular order. Their learning was majestic: their Latinate vocabularies, their parchments, their stately mien, their effortless command of the Common Law, the repository of Anglo-Saxon cultural habits dating back half a millennium. The United States may have been writing a new chapter in human history, but its lawyers, the people who really ran things, were part of an ancient guild connecting them to the Middle Ages. Tocqueville wrote, with understatement, “The government of democracy is favorable to the political power of lawyers.”
In a brief posthumous memoir of Van Buren, his family friend William Allen Butler conveyed the nineteenth-century sense that an attorney is somehow apart from mortal men, endowed with luminous, unearthly powers like those we now reserve for comic-book superheroes:
A true lawyer is always a lawyer. If he gives himself wholly to the severe discipline which is the condition of success, and gains the secrets of that science which, more than all other human forces, directs the progress of events, its subtle light surrounds him like an atmosphere, and accompanies him like a perpetual presence.
It does not appear that Van Buren ever considered another career, and well into his political career he was practicing law on the side. Even before he left school, Van Buren conducted mock trials with friends. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that relates a dazzling early legal performance when he was only a teenager, practicing at law against a much older sparring partner, and had to be helped up to stand on a table in his address to the jury. Either he was impressively young, or just very short. Now, in adulthood, all his talents came to the fore. His nose for research, his memory, and his shrewd common sense endowed him with a formidable ability in the courtroom.
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Van Buren was fortunate to have a Hudson Valley rival every bit as formidable in Elisha Williams, a staunch Federalist and, more often than not, the agent of the great families against whom Van Buren was invariably opposed. A newspaper once attacked Williams for his snobbery, complaining that he “disliked the ring-streaked and speckled population of our large towns and cities, comprising people of every kind and tongue.” Williams reserved some of that contempt for his ambitious adversary. He wrote waspishly, “Poor little Matty. What a blessing it is for one to think he is the greatest little fellow in the world. It would be cruel to compel this man to estimate himself correctly.” The “little fellow” would soon cut Williams down to size.
As this remark suggests, Williams was tall and grand, Van Buren compact and merely diligent. Benjamin Butler, Van Buren’s old friend, enjoyed the comparison:
Never were two men more dissimilar. Both were eloquent; but the eloquence of Williams was declamatory and exciting, that of Van Buren insinuating and delightful. Williams had the livelier imagination, Van Buren the sounder judgment. The former presented the strong points of his case in bolder relief, invested them with a more brilliant coloring, indulged a more unlicensed and magnificent invective, and gave more life and variety to his arguments by his peculiar wit and inimitable humor; but Van Buren was his superior in analyzing, arranging and combining the insulated materials, in comparing and weighing testimony, in unraveling the web of intricate affairs, in eviscerating truth from the mass of diversified and conflicting evidence, in softening the heart and molding it to his purpose and in working into the judgments of his hearers the conclusions of his own perspicuous and persuasive reasonings.
Over time, Van Buren prevailed more often than not, and as he did so, he began to develop the resources that would allow him to conquer so many others who would underestimate him. In retrospect, the skills Van Buren honed in the courtroom were identical to those he would apply to the political world. Preparation, hard work, and plain language—those were the earthy ingredients in the Little Magician’s alchemical brew. A lucky break came when he was able to buy the law library of an attorney and rectify some of his educational flaws by reading voraciously at
night. Slowly, he made a name for himself as a debater to be reckoned with, and soon, inevitably, he was using his legal talents to torture his social superiors.
Like all lawyers, Van Buren took the different cases that came his way. To some extent, he had no choice, for he admitted, “I was not worth a shilling when I commenced my professional career.” But a clear pattern was discernible. Generally, he defended the lower and middling orders that he had sprung from, and went on the attack against a social order that was nowhere near as democratic as the American Revolution would suggest. Specifically, he made his business the investigation of the huge patroon land grants, revealing his conviction that there were improprieties in the old claims that benefited the wealthy families and defrauded the small freeholders. The stakes were high and emotions ran high as well—Van Buren was even challenged to a duel by an agent for the Van Rensselaers (the duel never took place). Through his effective work, Van Buren drew “an opposition at once powerful, personal and peculiar.”
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All of Van Buren’s early biographers, the ones who knew him, agreed on the centrality of this experience. George Bancroft wrote, with perfervid prose, that “the farmer’s son from Kinderhook” had led the fight against “the claimants under ancient warrants.” William Allen Butler went one better by writing, “It was the old story of Richard and Saladin.” In his account, Van Buren almost single-handedly defeated “the Federalists of Columbia County, who had money, lands, and a kind of patrician pride; who believed in their own capacity to govern everybody, and disbelieved in the capacity of other people to govern themselves.”
Obviously, some of these memories were a little skewed, and there was no reason to drag Saladin in. Van Buren was not Richard the Lionheart and never would be. But he was well suited to the battle he had found. He liked to win, and he was good at it, which often enraged his opponents, especially since he was taking away power that they felt was their birthright. He won with his eloquence, his facts, and his street smarts. All three would come in handy as he climbed the political ladder. All would enrage his opponents, unaccustomed to losing, and would lay the groundwork for the attacks on Van Buren that never ceased throughout his incredibly long public career. As he put it, bluntly, “I was an eye-sore to the Magnates.”