Like the Adamses, Martin Van Buren had
a more distinguished, or rather a more significant, pre-presidential
career than his presidential one. In the 1820s he served as a U.S.
Senator from New York and helped organize the highly-disciplined
political machine, the Albany Regency, that became one of the nuclei
of the Democratic Party. To a great extent Van Buren was the
inventor of the national Democratic Party, which he believed could
unify sections of the country that had clashed with one
another over the issue of slavery expansion, in the Missouri Crisis
of 1819-21. Party discipline, and the rewards of patronage, could
prevent Northern and Southern whites from fighting with one another
and instead turn them against the real enemies: the National
Republicans and Whigs. Ostensibly, this meant that the two sections'
Democratic politicians would settle disputes over slavery with
compromises. In reality, Southern Democrats inevitably demanded that
their Northern counterparts protect the interests of slaveholders,
and they found ample support from Northern Democrats (“Doughfaces”)
who favored party unity more than human rights. Hence the
anti-abolitionist Congressional “gag rule” of 1836-44, the de
facto placement of the U.S. Post Office under state censorship in the South, the re-enslavement and sale of slaves taken
by the U.S. Navy from illegal slave traders, and other pro-slavery
federal policies. Van Buren supported these policies even if he did
not sponsor all of them.
None of these issues greatly affected
Van Buren's presidency, in part because his Whig rivals were not an
anti-slavery party and did not use slavery as a political cudgel
against the Democrats, and in part because he spent his time in
office dealing with the consequences of Jackson's presidency. While
Indian Removal was Andrew Jackson's legacy Van Buren was just as
determined to carry the program through; it was he who sent federal
troops into the Cherokee nation to remove the Cherokees at gunpoint,
resulting in the death of 4,500 people. It was Van Buren, not
Jackson, who had to deal with the Panic of 1837 and the economic
depression that followed it, even though Jackson's deflationary
Specie Circular had probably contributed to the downturn. The
depression was still underway at the end of Van Buren's first term
and was the principal factor leading to his defeat in the 1840
election, though William Harrison's partisans did put together a very
creative, Barnum-esque presidential campaign, including such
ditties as these:
Old Tip he wears a homespun coat
He has no ruffled shirt-wirt-wirt,
But Mat he wears the golden plate
And he's a little squirt-wirt-wirt.
Or so reports Joe Queenan
(Imperial Caddy [Hyperion, 1992], 115.) “Tip,” by the way,
is short for “Tippecanoe,” Harrison's nickname, and “Mat” for
“Matty Van,” the Whig's nickname for their opponent.
President Van Buren also had to deal
with the toxic issue of slavery expansion, when representatives of
the newly-independent Republic of Texas applied for annexation to the
United States. Matty Van's predecessor, Jackson, favored the
annexation of Texas, but Van Buren feared that adding a large new
slave state to the Union could split the Democratic Party, and so he
instead recognized Texas as an independent nation. This was one
instance when Van Buren actually stood up to the pro-slavery faction
in his party, and at the time it worked: Southern whites chose not to
fight and instead merely loaned Texas a lot of money. To his credit,
and eventual downfall, Matty stuck to his guns on the Texas
annexation issue. When Van B. sought the Democratic presidential
nomination again in 1844, Southern slave-owners denied him the prize
because of his stance on Texas, which John Tyler had
persuaded Southern whites they could now obtain as a new slave state
(or possibly as many as five if Texans chose to divide the
territory). Van Buren's defeat won him a consolation prize four years
later, when the Free Soil Party made him their presidential nominee.
It would be going too far, as They Might Be Giants did (in their song
“James K. Polk”), to call Mssr. Van Buren an “abolitionist,”
but he did lead opponents of slavery expansion out of the Democratic
Party, helping ensure the Democrats' electoral loss in 1848 and
ultimately the breakup of that party along sectional lines in the
1850s. Clio, the Muse of History, rarely shows a sense of humor, but
she does appreciate irony.
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