Van Buren known as political manager

By Don Roper
For the Poughkeepsie Journal

Van Buren helped create a new political system in which politicians were professionals. The two-party system, which began with the Democrats and Whigs, became firmly entrenched.

Van Buren overcame the disadvantage of his beginnings — a humble, legal apprenticeship. The skills and traits that led to his rise in the state bar’s top echelon — industry, patience and systematic thought — also led to his political rise.

In 1807, Van Buren married Hannah Hoes. They had four sons. When Hannah died in 1819, Van Buren assumed much of the burden of rearing them.

From 1808, when he received his first political position as the Columbia County surrogate, until 1841, when he left the presidency after defeat in the election of 1840, Van Buren almost constantly held public office at the state or national level.

It is, however, as a political manager that he is best known. This reputation is indicated by the names applied to him: ‘‘The Little Magician’’ and ‘‘The Red Fox’’ are but two.

No favors among his goals

The political manager’s long-range goal was to restore Thomas Jefferson’s political principles of state responsibilities and government, without favor, by means of restoring Jefferson’s party, one which Van Buren felt had been allowed to lapse.

At the state level, Van Buren’s most significant organizing feat was his role in getting moderate reforms through the Constitutional Convention of 1821, which brought the Constitution of 1777 up to date.

Van Buren’s state organization, called the Bucktails, sprang into being after Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828 and soon served as the northern pillar of the Democratic Party. As a reward for his contribution, which included successfully running for governor, Van Buren was named U.S. secretary of state, and became Jackson’s heir-apparent when he was chosen as vice president in 1832.

Depression clouds term

Elected in his own right in 1836, when the Whigs chose a strategy of running four regional candidates, Van Buren became a one-term president, in part because of the same circumstances that helped elevate him to the presidency.

Van Buren inherited the depression that broke almost simultaneously with his taking office and became the first president in history to be victimized by a nationwide economic disaster. William Henry Harrison of the Whig party defeated him in 1840.

Then, his carefully nurtured Democratic Party, with its emphasis on national unity, made it incumbent that the compromise with slavery be maintained.

As a northerner, Van Buren, despite his efforts to allay such fears, was suspect to slaveholders in the party. This was a factor in his being denied the presidential nomination in 1844.

Because of the question of slavery in the territories, Van Buren broke party discipline and allowed himself to be dragooned into unsuccessfully running for president in 1848 on the ticket of the Free-Soil party, which opposed the extension of slavery into land recently won from Mexico. With the Democratic vote split, New York state went to the Whigs and Zachary Taylor became president. Van Buren died in 1862.

Don Roper is professor emeritus of history at the State University of New York at New Paltz.