Martin Van Buren: The Man Who Invented the Party
The Founders regarded political parties as a disease — faction, corruption, the thing republics died of. Then a lawyer from a Dutch village on the Hudson decided they had it exactly backwards, and built one on purpose. Martin Van Buren's contemporaries called him the Little Magician and the Red Fox of Kinderhook, and neither name was entirely affectionate. He created the Democratic Party, made Andrew Jackson president, invented the machinery of American electoral politics, and then discovered that none of it could protect him from an economic depression.
Kinderhook
Van Buren was born on 5 December 1782 in Kinderhook, New York, into a family of Dutch descent in Columbia County. The date matters: he was the first president born after the American Revolution, and the first not descended from the British. English was not the language of his childhood home. He attended Kinderhook Academy, graduating in 1796, and then trained as a lawyer rather than attending college. He was raised in the Dutch Reformed church, and he came to national politics without any of the Virginian or Bostonian pedigree his predecessors had carried.
In February 1807 he married Hannah Hoes. She died in 1819, leaving him with five sons — Abraham, John, Martin, Winfield Scott and Smith Thompson.
The Albany Regency
New York politics in the 1810s was a snake pit of personal factions, and Van Buren's insight was to replace personality with organisation. He served in the state senate and as attorney general, and assembled a disciplined network of allies that became known as the Albany Regency — a machine that survived the absence of any particular leader because it was built on loyalty to the organisation itself. In 1821 he went to the United States Senate, where he served until 1828, and in 1828 he was elected governor of New York.
Then he did it at national scale. After William H. Crawford's failed presidential bid in 1824, Van Buren constructed what the Miller Center describes as "a national political coalition that became the Democratic Party," and pointed it at Andrew Jackson, who won in 1828.
Jackson's Right Hand
Jackson made him Secretary of State, where he was, by all accounts, an effective diplomat. When the cabinet dissolved into factional warfare he resigned cleanly and took a diplomatic posting in London. Jackson, who valued him above anyone, put him on the ticket as vice president in 1832, an unmistakable designation of the succession. Van Buren served as vice president from 1833 and won the presidency in his own right in 1836.
He took office on 4 March 1837, telling the country in his inaugural address that among great nations America stood "without a parallel in the world." It was the high-water mark of his career and it lasted about eight weeks.
The Panic
The depression that struck in 1837 was not his doing. Critics blamed Jackson's war on the Bank of the United States, but British banks were tightening American credit and domestic banks were calling in loans. The causes were structural; the timing was catastrophic. The crisis ran from 1837 into the early 1840s, wiping out farmers who lost mortgaged land and southern planters who had borrowed against land and enslaved people.
Van Buren's response was ideological rather than interventionist. Refusing both to revive the dead Second Bank and to keep using Jackson's "pet banks," he proposed an Independent Treasury that would house federal money on its own account and "divorce" the government entirely from the banking system. Both parties resisted; the Independent Treasury Act finally passed in 1840. It was a coherent idea, arguably a sound one, and it did nothing for anyone who was hungry in 1838. Democrats had entered his term with comfortable congressional majorities and by 1841 had lost control of Congress, the Whigs picking up more than forty House seats and seven in the Senate.
The Record He Cannot Escape
The rest of the domestic record is worse. Van Buren carried on Jackson's Indian removal, prosecuting the Second Seminole War and overseeing the Cherokee deportation known as the Trail of Tears, which killed roughly four thousand people. He reported to Congress that the Cherokee had moved "without any apparent reluctance" — one of the most contemptible sentences ever written by an American president.
He protected slavery consistently, supporting restrictions on antislavery petitions to Congress, and in the Amistad case he ordered the self-emancipated Africans returned as property; the Supreme Court freed them after he had left office. In 1839 he refused the Mormons' appeal for redress over their persecution in Missouri, on the explicit calculation that helping them would cost him votes.
Abroad he did better. Tensions on the Canadian border, inflamed by the Caroline affair, could easily have produced a war, and Van Buren defused them by patient diplomacy rather than force.
Why Martin Is Called a Genius
Van Buren's claim is unusual among presidents because it rests on an idea rather than an achievement in office. He grasped something the Founding generation had explicitly denied: that organised, permanent, competing political parties are not a pathology of republics but the mechanism that makes mass democracy work. Parties, in his conception, disciplined ambition, aggregated interests across a continent, and — crucially — made the transfer of power routine rather than a crisis of personalities.
He then built the thing he had theorised, twice: the Albany Regency in New York and the Democratic Party nationally, which is still contesting elections nearly two centuries later. The Miller Center's assessment is blunt about where his importance lies — his most significant contribution was "creating the Democratic Party and in setting the expectations for electoral competition based on two opposing political parties." Every American election since runs on hardware Van Buren designed. His contemporaries recognised the skill and were slightly afraid of it, which is why they called him the Little Magician.
The counter-case is heavy. As a president he was mediocre, and scholars, as the Miller Center concedes, generally regard his administration as a disappointment. He met the worst depression in the young republic's history with a doctrine rather than a policy. Morally, he is indefensible on the questions that mattered most in his century: the Trail of Tears, the Amistad, the gag on antislavery petitions. And his own memoirs, published after his death, never even reached his presidency — the great organiser could not organise an account of his own failure. His 1848 run as the antislavery Free Soil candidate, after a lifetime of protecting slavery, reads to many as opportunism rather than conversion. Van Buren was a genius of political machinery and a small man in the exercise of power.
Legacy
He lost the 1840 election to William Henry Harrison in a campaign that inverted reality: the Whigs painted Van Buren, who had risen from a Dutch village without a college education, as an out-of-touch elitist living in luxury, and sold Harrison as a plain farmer. Both portraits were false, and the false one won — a lesson in the power of the very techniques Van Buren had pioneered, turned against him.
Opposition to the immediate annexation of Texas cost him the Democratic nomination in 1844. The Free Soil Party nominated him in 1848. He died at Kinderhook on 24 July 1862, aged seventy-nine, with the country he had organised into two competing parties at war with itself.
The party he built is still running candidates. The two-party structure he argued for is still the frame of American politics. Few presidents have been so unsuccessful in office and so permanently consequential outside it.
Achievements
- President of the United States (1837–1841)
- member of the State Senate of New York
- Vice President of the United States (1833–1837)
- United States Secretary of State (1829–1831)
