8th POTUS Martin Van Buren is vaguely remembered today, but….

…he holds a few interesting distinctions.

Born in 1782, he was the first President who was not born a British subject. He was the only President who learned another language before learning English. His first language was Dutch.

He is also considered by many historians to be the first American professional politician.

Born in New York’s Catskills Mountains, about 20 miles south of Albany, he was the son of a tavern owner and his second wife. His local schooling ended when he was about fourteen. Desiring a better life than as an innkeeper, he read law with Peter Silvester, a prominent Federalist attorney. Silvester and his son stressed a meticulous personal appearance. Young Martin Van Buren thus shed his rough homespun clothing, for a somewhat foppish wardrobe – and manners.

Most indications are that MVB was a quick study, but preferred political activities to the mundane practice of law. He aligned with the Democratic-Republicans.

 

The Making of a Politician

If there was one talent MVB seemed to have in abundance, it was knowing where his bread was buttered. His allegiance to the Democratic-Republican platform and party was loyal enough, but the New York D-Rs were a fractured bunch, with some factions favoring George and DeWitt Clinton, and others who preferred soon-to-be sullied Vice President Aaron Burr. Without seeming to alienate anyone, he straddled both factions, supporting whichever promised to enhance his career, i.e. the best chances of victory. By thirty, he had been elected to the NY State Senate, and was seldom out of office (of any kind) for the next forty years.

It did not take him long to demonstrate another of his talents: combining his natural charm and cultured elegance with wily and devious political skills. He became the leader of the Albany Regency, one of the first political “machines,” that would later morph into the Jacksonian Democrats. By the mid-1820s, his political skills were becoming well known on a national level. They were calling Matty Van Buren the “Little Magician” or the “Sly Fox of Kinderhook.”

Concurrent with being State Senator, he was NY’s Attorney General; by the time he was 40, was elected to the US Senate. In 1829, he was elected NY Governor, but that only lasted a few days; newly-elected President Andrew Jackson appointed him Secretary of State. Then he was Minister to Great Britain, elected Vice President in 1832, and finally President in 1836.

Becoming a Jacksonian

In 1824, it was a four-way presidential race, with Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford pitted against Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. Van Buren believed that a) Crawford had the best chances to win, and b) the new focus on “internal improvements” were against Constitutional dictates regarding “states’ rights.” But in early 1824, Crawford suffered a debilitating stroke. Nevertheless, MVB continued his active political support for him.

The four-way election had no clear winner, however, and was determined in the House of Representatives.

True to his gift for landing butter-side-up, he stayed out of the vicious fray that followed, incurred no animosity with Adams or Clay, but he had begun to like Jackson. A lot.

Fifteen years Van Buren’s senior, Andrew Jackson was not only a household word, but legitimately a legend in his own time: the Hero of The Technically-Too-Late Battle of New Orleans. Nobody cared about technicalities. General Jackson was a monolith of leadership. Impressed by his cultivated “gentlemanly” qualities and appearance, Van Buren found his ticket to fame. He would be a devoted Jacksonian (albeit with a Van Buren-ish tilt) as long as the old General lived.

He became indispensable to Jackson, first as Secretary of State, then as Minister to England, and finally as Vice President, putting him in direct line for the presidency in 1836. The opposition was a fractured bunch of anti-Jacksonians, soon to be called “Whigs.” It was an easy victory for the Little Magician.

Along with the honor of high office, Martin Van Buren inherited a banking policy from Andrew Jackson doomed not only to failure, but to the first serious economic “panic” or recession the country had ever had. The new President was not responsible for the policies, but he did reap the whirlwind of its unrest and financial insecurity, and history has come to judge him as middling. There have been worse.

The Ironic Campaign of 1840

Van Buren was definitely vulnerable. By 1840, the Whigs were more organized, and fielded a tall, craggy 68-year-old General from 30 years past – William Henry Harrison – as their candidate.

In a remarkable stroke of either irony or publicity genius, the Whigs flipped a perceived “slur” to their benefit. When a democratic newspaper commented that if you gave Harrison a jug of hard cider, he would remain happy in his log cabin. Outraged Whigs took the comment and ran with the ball – and kept the ball rolling.

Harrison, a Virginian from a mega-prominent family tree, was the son of a “Signer,” and Virginia Governor. Educated at Hampton-Sydney University, raised in luxury and high station, he now became the embodiment of the Common Man in a “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign. Songs were sung, flags and banners were produced in abundance and log cabin floats were part of every torchlight parade. Rivers of hard cider flowed.

• 

Naturally, the somewhat foppish “Matty” Van Buren was a natural opponent. His was a much lower class upbringing. If the Whigs invented the virtues of the rough-hewn, it flung it mud at the vices of perceived Van Buren ostentation, and sang songs about “Van, Van, the used-up man”.

So the son of a small village tavern-owner starting life in homespun and eating gruel was castigated for eating from gold plates and silver spoons in a luxurious lifestyle at the White House. 

It was a rousing, but dirty campaign all the way around. Mostly lies, of course, save one: Matty Van Buren was accused of bathing regularly. He did.

Sources:

Niven, John – Martin Van Buren – Oxford University Press, 1983

Shafer, Ron G. – The Carnival Campaign: How the Rollicking 1840 Campaign of “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” Changed Presidential Elections Forever –The Chicago Press, 2017

The mansion of Grouseland

https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/martin-van-buren/

https://www.presidentprofiles.com/Washington-Johnson/Martin-Van-Buren-Campaign-of-1840.html

https://www.ourcampaigns.com/CandidateDetail.html?CandidateID=4114