Early Life and Career

Born on December 5, 1782, Martin Van Buren was the first U.S. president born in the new nation. His parents Abraham and Maria raised him in the Dutch culture of their heritage, which was still strong in and around Martin’s birthplace of Kinderhook, New York. Martin’s childhood was spent watching and learning from the people who ate, drank, and slept at his father’s tavern in Kinderhook. This tavern also served as a local polling place, and its proximity to nearby Albany helped introduce Martin Van Buren to local and state politics as travelers made their way to and from the state capital.

Van Buren attended a local school until age fourteen, then served as a clerk in a local law office. He moved to New York City in 1802 and earned his law license the next year. He then moved back to Kinderhook to open a law practice with his half-brother. Van Buren actively practiced law until 1828, well into his national political career. His approach toward law mirrored his developing political philosophy: a belief in limited government interference with the rights of private citizens in order to encourage entrepreneurialism and his faith in the “good sense” of free American citizens to direct their own affairs.

Van Buren’s political philosophy stemmed from his embrace of Jeffersonianism and its emphasis on a more rural, agricultural society, the limited power of the national government, states’ rights, and a more expansive political democracy for white men. While his father was a Jeffersonian Republican, many of those living in their community supported the Federalists, who prioritized a more active national government and a more urban, industrial society supported by internal improvements, a national bank, and protective tariffs.

Fortunately for Martin Van Buren, he had influential distant relatives in the Van Ness family who were Republicans. They provided not only the security of similar viewpoints but also connections to the broader political world in Van Buren’s early legal career, including fellow New Yorkers Aaron Burr, who was Thomas Jefferson’s vice president, and DeWitt Clinton, a U.S. senator who was elected New York City mayor. When Burr’s political career spiraled following his killing of Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel, Van Buren gave Clinton’s faction his allegiance.

As Van Buren’s legal and political careers spurred him toward more involvement in public life, his private life also changed. In February 1807, he married Hannah Hoes, his first cousin once-removed. Very little is known about their relationship. No known letters written by Hannah or between her and her husband exist. Van Buren rarely mentioned her in contemporary correspondence, and she is completely absent from his later correspondence and autobiography. What is clear is that as her husband became more politically active and physically absent, she was the main caretaker of their household, which eventually included four sons. (A fifth son died in infancy.) Hannah died in February 1819. Although linked publicly and privately with several women over the next two decades, Martin never remarried.

Entry into State Politics

Van Buren won election to the New York state senate in 1812, and his star continued to rise during the war with Great Britain that began that year. President James Madison’s administration appointed him a special judge advocate in the court-martial trial of General William Hull, who capitulated to the British in 1812 by giving up Detroit without a fight despite having superior forces. Van Buren’s forceful support of the war effort and his call for New York’s recognition as an integral part of the United States’ success endeared him to many New York Republicans. He was appointed the state’s attorney general in 1815, and he continued to hold a seat in the state senate.

The War of 1812 not only elevated Van Buren’s political profile, but it also marked the start of his break with DeWitt Clinton. Clinton unsuccessfully challenged Madison’s presidential reelection bid in 1812, despite Van Buren’s hard work to bring New York into Clinton’s column. Van Buren believed that Clinton had betrayed him, however, by not showing the same enthusiastic support in his own campaign to become New York attorney general. The split between the two men grew over the ensuing years.

Van Buren helped establish and lead the Bucktails, an anti-Clinton faction of Republicans that grew out of the Tammany Society and adopted one of its insignias, a deer tail, as its own. The Bucktails provided a model for the Albany Regency, which Van Buren formed in the 1820s. Both groups challenged the Clinton faction of New York Republicans and furthered the political ambitions of Van Buren and his allies—men such as Benjamin F. Butler, William L. Marcy, and Silas Wright Jr.—both statewide and nationally. Later political machines and political parties drew on the organizational and electioneering techniques used by the Bucktails and Albany Regency to find success.

In 1821, Van Buren’s Bucktail faction led the charge to revise New York’s constitution. Van Buren served as one of the delegates at the state’s constitutional convention. He opposed universal male suffrage, advocating for voting rights for those men who demonstrated personal investment in their community. Van Buren eventually supported the lifting of property-owning requirements for white men to vote, but he opposed the same voting rights for African American men unless they owned, and paid taxes on, property with a minimum value of $250.

Gaining National Experience

Van Buren won election to the U.S. Senate in 1821 and made his way to Washington, D.C., shortly after the close of the New York state constitutional convention. He served on the Senate’s finance committee and chaired its judiciary committee. His work drew the attention of President James Monroe, who considered him for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Van Buren’s speeches displayed his lifelong propensity for in-depth background research on which he based long, complex explanations of his positions. In other words, he was usually not concise. Van Buren continued to hold to Jeffersonian principles, although he found that a national perspective sometimes required more nuanced positions.

By the time Van Buren arrived in the nation’s capital in December 1821, the political makeup of the United States mirrored what had happened in New York. No longer facing a formidable threat to their power from the Federalists, Republicans were splitting into rival factions. Van Buren brought the lessons that he learned about personality-based politics in New York with him to Washington and used his experience to begin building a network that would help unify Republicans. Colleagues especially noted his outreach to southern congressional members, among whom he found allies in John Forsyth (Georgia), James Hamilton Jr. (South Carolina), and John Randolph (Virginia).

The 1824 presidential election exposed the weakness of not having national Republican unity. All four candidates who received electoral votes were Republicans: Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, House Speaker Henry Clay of Kentucky, Treasury secretary William H. Crawford of Georgia, and U.S. senator Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. Van Buren supported Crawford, but Adams, the son of second U.S. president John Adams, became president.

Adams’ victory was not without controversy, however. Jackson, a War of 1812 hero, had won the most electoral votes but not the constitutionally required majority; therefore, the decision of who would become president went to the U.S. House of Representatives. Surprisingly, the majority of state delegations in the House voted in Adams’ favor. Jackson’s supporters accused Adams and Clay of stealing the election not just from their candidate but also from the American people. Within a few months, Jackson made clear his intention to challenge Adams in 1828.

Van Buren was not completely sold on Jackson’s fidelity to Jeffersonian principles, but by early 1827, he was organizing a national coalition, which included Adams’ vice president John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, into what became the Democratic Party. Van Buren saw utility in using Jackson’s hero status to unite northern and southern voters into a national political coalition that would obscure the sectional divisions of the nation.

As Van Buren worked to elect Jackson in 1828, DeWitt Clinton died while serving as New York’s governor. Van Buren’s allies tapped him to run as his old rival’s replacement. Both Jackson and Van Buren won their elections that fall. Van Buren became the governor of New York on January 1, 1829, but he was already expecting Jackson to offer him a cabinet post.

Serving in Jackson’s Administration

Just over two months into his gubernatorial term, Van Buren resigned to accept the position of secretary of state in Jackson’s cabinet. His tenure in the State Department proved tumultuous as the president’s cabinet—indeed, his entire system of formal and informal advisors—fell into chaos. On the surface, the controversy centered on the marriage of Secretary of War John Eaton to local Washington widow Margaret O’Neale Timberlake. Many Washington women believed that John and Margaret had been intimately involved before her husband John Timberlake’s death. They also objected to Margaret’s failure to adhere to contemporary expectations that women should refrain from becoming involved in politics.

If President Jackson had remained neutral, then the firestorm might have died out. His response was affected, however, by the death of his wife Rachel shortly after his election in 1828 and the accusations that their own marriage had faced early on, when they had been accused of adultery before Rachel’s first husband had divorced her. Jackson demanded that his cabinet members and advisors require their wives to interact socially with the Eatons. Some advisors and wives refused to follow these instructions, including Jackson’s own niece, Emily Donelson, who was fulfilling the White House responsibilities that her aunt Rachel would have handled.

Martin Van Buren was a widower, however, with no wife to manage socially, and he was solidly on the president’s side in the controversy. His loyalty impressed Jackson, who by the end of 1829 was telling friends that Van Buren “deserve[d] to fill the highest office” because the American people would find him to be “a true friend and safe depository of their rights and liberty.” Jackson did not have the same opinion of Vice President John C. Calhoun, who became the face of the anti-Eaton advisors. Jackson’s distrust of Calhoun ran deeper than just the Eaton controversy, though.

The South Carolinian, who had been a nationalist during the War of 1812, had begun supporting a states’ right position that was willing to sacrifice the Union for state autonomy. By contrast, Van Buren’s Jeffersonian perspective was more aligned with Jackson’s aversion to prioritizing states’ rights over the perpetuity of the Union. With the so-called “Petticoat War” continuing to rage into Jackson’s third year in office, in April 1831, Van Buren and Eaton formulated a solution: they would resign from the cabinet, which would allow the president to ask for the resignation of the other cabinet members and provide him with the opportunity to appoint a new group of advisors.

The cabinet transition was not smooth, but Van Buren’s willingness to sacrifice his political career impressed Jackson. The president rewarded the New Yorker by giving him a recess appointment as minister to Great Britain. Van Buren made it to London in the fall of 1831. His tenure was short-lived, however; in January 1832, the Senate, with the deciding vote of Vice President Calhoun, rejected Van Buren’s nomination. Van Buren’s return to the United States was quickly followed by his nomination as Jackson’s running mate. The Democratic Party ticket won a resounding victory over those of the National Republicans and the Anti-Masons that fall.

At around the same time, the split between Jackson and Calhoun came to a head when South Carolina nullified two federal tariffs, creating a crisis pitting the national government against a state government. Vice President-elect Van Buren counseled Jackson to take a cautious approach to prevent a military conflict, advice that the president largely ignored. Congress passed compromise legislation, ironically fashioned in large part by Calhoun and Henry Clay, that provided a political resolution to the crisis and cooled off the sectional conflict for the time being.

Once he assumed the vice presidency, Van Buren spent a lot of time helping Jackson manage the fallout from the president’s escalating fight with the Second Bank of the United States. Jackson believed that the Bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle, had used the institution’s power and its deposits, part of which came from the United States government, to try to defeat him in 1828. When the Bank’s charter came up for renewal in 1832, Jackson vetoed it.

In his second term, Jackson asked his new vice president and other cabinet members to support his decision to withdraw federal deposits from the Bank and place them in so-called “pet banks,” or pro-Jackson state banks. Jackson’s efforts were so aggressive that by 1834, his opponents had renamed themselves the Whigs, a nod to the British political party that had fought against the power of the monarchy.

Van Buren did not fully support the president’s strategy to weaken the Bank. He was concerned about its effect on New York, the very real threat of dividing the Democratic Party, and, most importantly, the harm it might do to his own chances of succeeding Jackson as president. Van Buren took a moderate approach throughout, doing just enough to keep Jackson and many influential Democrats happy, while also not fully committing himself to the Bank War consuming the administration.

Van Buren’s pragmatic approach while in Jackson’s orbit did not prevent criticism from coming his way. Some Democrats, such as Calhoun, resented that Van Buren stood in the way of their own presidential ambitions. Others thought that the New Yorker was manipulating Jackson simply to further his own career. Critics of all partisan stripes began referring to Van Buren by some of the nicknames that he had acquired in New York politics, e.g., “the fox,” “the little magician,” to signal his perceived willingness to do anything to get ahead.

Whatever motivated Van Buren during these years, he proved an essential advisor to Jackson, drafting important messages and giving thoughtful feedback on issues that affected not only the president but also the party that they had built together and the nation at large. This experience also prepared Van Buren for the next logical step in his career: running for president.