When Democrats nominated Martin Van Buren in May 1835, he assured them that he would “endeavor to tread generally in the footsteps of President Jackson—happy if I shall be able to perfect the work which he has so gloriously begun.” To that end, Van Buren retained all but one of his predecessor’s cabinet members. Most of Van Buren’s cabinet officers were longtime colleagues and friends, such as Secretary of State John Forsyth, Treasury secretary Levi Woodbury, and Attorney General Benjamin Butler. They provided not only continuity with Jackson’s administration but also familiarity as the New Yorker entered the White House. The only new cabinet member was Joel R. Poinsett, who headed the Department of War.

Economic Depression

Shortly after Van Buren took office, the United States plunged into an economic depression often referred to as the Panic of 1837, although it was actually a series of economic crises that began in 1837 and lasted into the early 1840s. At the time, critics largely attributed its origins to the Bank War of Jackson’s presidency, although other domestic and foreign circumstances played significant roles as well, including British banks limiting money going into the U.S. economy and U.S. banks calling in loans. Nevertheless, Van Buren found himself facing an unprecedented economic downturn that called for an innovative response, one which challenged his belief in a restrained national government.

The Second Bank of the United States’ charter had ended in 1836 thanks to Andrew Jackson’s veto of the Bank recharter bill in 1832, and Van Buren had no interest in reviving it. He also did not consider Jackson’s use of “pet banks,” moving government funds into pro-Jackson state banks, a viable solution. Instead, the president called a special session of Congress, which convened in September 1837, and he introduced the idea of an independent treasury system, in which federal dollars would be housed in an independent Treasury rather than a national bank or state banks. The independent treasury system would “divorce” the U.S. Treasury from the nation’s banking system and restore economic stability. President Van Buren’s proposal met with opposition from both Whigs and Democrats, and Congress did not pass the Independent Treasury Act based on Van Buren’s model until 1840.

By then, Van Buren’s chances of crafting a positive economic turnaround were virtually nil. Banks had closed, costing Americans their deposits. Farmers were ruined when they lost the farms that they had bought on credit. In the southern states, planters, many of whom relied on credit to buy land and the enslaved people who worked on it, lost everything.

All of this economic suffering cost the Democrats their control of Congress. Van Buren began his presidency with Democrats possessing cushions of almost twenty seats in the U.S. Senate and nearly thirty in the U.S. House. By the time he left office in 1841, Whigs had over forty more seats than the Democrats in the House and seven more in the Senate. Even Van Buren’s months-long tour of the mid-Atlantic states in the summer of 1839, during which he made speeches defending his economic policies, failed to turn the tide in the Democrats’ favor.

Support for Slavery

As if the economy was not enough of a problem, Van Buren had other issues that demanded his attention. One was slavery. During his 1836 presidential campaign, he had promised to oppose any congressional attempt to end slavery in the nation’s capital and to leave it alone where it existed. Van Buren’s inaugural address reinforced this message to his proslavery supporters. Faced with “scenes of dangerous excitement [and] terrifying instances of local violence” perpetrated, in his belief, by abolitionists, he predicted that during his administration, Americans would continue to “resist and control every effort, foreign or domestic, which aims or would lead to overthrow our institutions.”

Van Buren did his best to keep his promise to protect slavery. He supported John C. Calhoun’s attempt to stop the introduction of antislavery petitions on the Senate floor. In 1839, a group of Africans seized control of the Spanish slave ship Amistad that had taken them to Cuba. They ordered the ship to return to Africa, but the captains turned the ship north, and it landed in New York. Van Buren and his cabinet considered the self-emancipated Africans property, and, in January 1840, the president issued an executive order that the African men be turned over to their previous enslavers. Abolitionists took up the cause of the Africans, and the Amistad survivors eventually won their case for freedom before the U.S. Supreme Court, but by that time, Van Buren was out of office.

Van Buren inherited another slavery-related dilemma from Andrew Jackson. The Mexican territory of Texas won its independence in 1836 (largely with the help of Americans living there) and requested annexation to the United States. Jackson only recognized Texas’ independence before leaving office, however, forcing Van Buren to come up with a conclusive answer to Texas’ request to become part of the United States. Consumed with addressing the economic depression and concerned that annexing Texas would focus debate not just on slavery’s existence but its expansion westward, Van Buren declined to act. This decision seemed to align with expressed public opinion at the time, but it would come back to haunt him during the 1844 presidential campaign.

Treatment of Native Americans

President Jackson’s treatment of Native Americans during his presidency received substantial criticism then, and it remains a point of condemnation today. Van Buren, however, promised to carry on what he considered the “philanthropic and enlightened policy” of Indian removal undertaken by his predecessor.

One area in which Van Buren followed Jackson was in prosecuting the Second Seminole War. Begun in Florida 1835 and lasting until 1842, most of the war was fought during Van Buren’s administration. His secretary of war, Joel R. Poinsett, acted aggressively in using the U.S. Army to try to subdue the Seminole, but swampy terrain in Florida and the Seminole’s determination to maintain their independence, coupled with the nation’s dire economic situation, prevented a quick U.S. victory. Whigs used the war as a political cudgel against Van Buren and turned the conflict into a moral question.

Van Buren also implemented the removal of most of the remaining Cherokee in the southeastern states, commonly referred to as the Trail of Tears. Jackson laid the groundwork for Cherokee removal when he signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which offered to relocate Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi River in exchange for their land in eastern and southern states. Some tribes agreed, but many did not, which led to forced removal, a process that Van Buren supported. He sent General Winfield Scott, who had earlier been involved in the Seminole War, to carry out the removal order.

The forced deportation of the Cherokee was incompetently planned and brutally executed, a deadly combination that cost approximately 4,000 Cherokee their lives and exacted untold physical and emotional trauma on those who survived. Van Buren reported a different result in his December 1838 message to Congress: in his words, the Cherokee had moved “without any apparent reluctance,” Scott had carried out removal “with commendable energy and humanity,” and the process had “had the happiest effects.” Although few at the time questioned Van Buren’s message, the Trail of Tears remains a damaging legacy of his presidency.

Religious Freedom

Religious freedom was another issue that presented a challenge for Van Buren. In 1839, leaders of the newly formed Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including the Church’s prophet Joseph Smith, traveled to Washington to ask President Van Buren for his assistance. Facing violent persecution in Missouri for their religious beliefs and rumors that they wanted to weaken slavery, Church members (commonly called Mormons) had been forced out of the state, and they wanted reparations for their damaged and lost property.

Prior to becoming president, Van Buren had expressed his belief in religious liberty for Catholics and had assisted the Shakers, a religious sect, when its members had experienced unfair treatment in New York. Now, however, his administration was under constant assault because of the economy, and a tough reelection campaign loomed the following year. Consequently, Van Buren rejected the Mormons’ appeal because he feared losing Missouri’s electoral vote, leading Smith to comment bitterly that the president was unfit to serve because of his unwillingness “to lift his finger to relieve an oppressed and persecuted community of free-men.”

Legal Legacy

Van Buren appointed two U.S. Supreme Court justices during his presidency. (A third, John Catron, was appointed by Andrew Jackson but confirmed shortly after Van Buren took office.) The first was John McKinley of Alabama, who assumed one of two new Supreme Court seats created on March 3, 1837. He received a recess appointment in April 1837. Van Buren nominated him in September, and the U.S. Senate confirmed him the same month. McKinley kept a low profile on the court, serving as a voice supporting states’ rights. He served until his death in 1852.

Shortly before leaving office in 1841, Van Buren appointed Peter Vivian Daniel of Virginia to the court. Daniel proved to be a reactionary justice, often dissenting from the majority. He was, however, a strong supporter of slavery, writing concurring opinions in two major cases that strengthened the institution: Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) and Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Daniel served until his death in 1860.