The father of the party system
Martin Van Buren became president on March 4, 1837, at a time of great optimism. After an acrimonious eight years in the White House, Andrew Jackson was leaving office on a high note. The economy was strong and vibrant. The nation had avoided a civil war. Washington politicians were confident that “the abolitionist scourge” was in retreat. When Van Buren delivered his inaugural address before 20,000 people—nearly all of them there to pay tribute to Jackson, not to welcome Van Buren—he pledged to rule with a light touch. The nation, Van Buren said, had reached a stage where its citizens could govern themselves. They did not need Washington. He called upon the American people “to make our beloved land for a thousand generations that chosen spot where happiness springs from a perfect equality of political rights.” He used the words “happy” or “happiness” seven times in his speech.
He went on to serve for four unhappy years as president.
Weeks into his administration, the economy collapsed. Banks had run out of specie and could not redeem paper money, leaving many Americans broke. The Army brutally carried out the expulsion of the Cherokees and Seminoles from their homelands. Indian removal was not only a humanitarian disaster but a political debacle for Van Buren, whose support among northerners suffered as a result. Further weakening northern support were his frequent capitulations to the slave power. He sided with Spanish kidnappers in the Amistad case and backed efforts to suppress abolitionist literature in the mails and in Congress.
Van Buren had some successes as president. He showed courage and foresight in subduing skirmishes along the northern border that could have led to war with Great Britain. He wisely resisted those within his party calling to annex Texas. And he passed a treasury plan that moved the government away from using unstable state banks to manage the nation’s resources. Yet these victories were not enough to keep him in the White House. In 1840, Americans, for the first time, voted with their pocketbooks. He lost in a landslide to William Henry Harrison, a veteran from the War of 1812 nearing seventy years of age, in one of the most frenzied elections in US history (“Tippecanoe and Tyler too!”). Eighty percent of those eligible voted, still the highest percentage of voter turnout in the nation’s history.
Van Buren was the first of several undistinguished one-term presidents who failed to halt America’s descent into civil war. Pierce, Buchanan, Tyler, Fillmore—their names usually land at the bottom of presidential rankings. Among the antebellum chief executives, only Polk, who led the nation during the Mexican War, has won praise from some historians, although that is changing too. Few today see the Mexican War as an honorable affair.
Ranking presidents, it must be said, is a mug’s game. The practice reduces the presidency to simplistic and outdated notions of “leadership” and “character.” As a result, key moments in history are downplayed, if not ignored altogether. Van Buren served during a transitional period in US politics, when a more militant and defensive South emerged to dominate politics for a quarter century. Devoid of Jackson’s charisma and popularity, Van Buren was flummoxed by this turn of events, and his bumbling balancing act satisfied few. His presidency, therefore, reminds us of the perils of surrendering principles to a party’s worst elements.
A vibrant party system checked the forces of wealth and privilege seeking to manipulate government for private gain.
Because Van Buren was an unsuccessful president, his more significant contributions to the nation’s political life have also been obscured. His greatest legacy remains his role in building the nation’s party system (however destructive and dubious partisanship may seem today). Rejecting the Founders’ call for public officials to be “disinterested” (a favorite word of theirs), Van Buren saw parties as a positive good, a mechanism for resolving sectional disputes, keeping citizens engaged, and holding politicians accountable. Most important, a vibrant party system checked the forces of wealth and privilege seeking to manipulate government for private gain. In his unshakable view, strong parties led to sound government—and upheld the all-important principle of majority rule. His advocacy of a permanent party system led to the founding of the Democratic Party, the one still in existence today, albeit in a dramatically different form.
As Van Buren learned during his presidency and its aftermath, however, parties can serve sinister forces as well. In his time the Democratic Party became a vehicle for the expansion of slavery, the deracination of Native peoples, and imperial conquest of the West, better known as Manifest Destiny. Van Buren did not have the mettle to stand up to these forces when he was president. He found his voice in 1848, when he ran for president with the antislavery Free Soil Party, but the slaveocracy could not be stopped. Bitter and unhappy, he died in 1862, with the future of his nation very much in doubt.
The US has endured, though, and so has his party. Meanwhile, Americans are still quarreling over executive power, states’ rights, immigration, war, and economic inequality—issues dominating Van Buren’s time in politics as well. The history of our current discord is long and deep.
Featured image: Colorized portrait of Martin Van Buren from a Matthew Brady photograph. Daniel Hass, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0
