In his posthumously published memoirs, Martin Van Buren covered his rise in New York politics and his subsequent contributions to the formation of the Democratic Party and Andrew Jackson’s presidency. It seems symbolic, however, that the memoirs never reached his own presidential administration, depriving Americans of Van Buren’s self-assessment of his time as chief executive. In much the same way, scholars focus on his pre-presidential enterprises as the peak of his political career, with Van Buren’s presidency a disappointing coda best forgotten.

Van Buren’s life, however, was more than the high of building a political party, more than the low of having his presidential agenda derailed by an economic depression. His story was one of talent, hard work, ambition, success, personal loss, failure, false hope, betrayal, and sadness. In other words, Van Buren lived the range of human experience, making his life a reminder that despite the power and prestige they hold, presidents are regular people, too.

Martin Van Buren was a one-term president whose administration faced significant challenges and produced mixed results at best. His mark on U.S. history was about more than those four years, though. He was the most significant figure in creating the Democratic Party and in setting the expectations for electoral competition based on two opposing political parties. Politics in the United States would look very differently today without his contributions.

Politician on the Rise

Born in 1782, Van Buren was the first president born after the American Revolution and the first not descended from the British. He was raised in Columbia County, New York, an area largely populated by people of Dutch ancestry, like the Van Burens, and supportive of the Federalists. Martin’s father, Abraham, was a Jeffersonian Republican, and his son followed in his footsteps.

Martin Van Buren became a lawyer and worked his way up in New York state politics, dominated at the time by the likes of Aaron Burr and DeWitt Clinton. Van Buren spent time in the New York state senate, then was appointed as the state’s attorney general. By the time he entered the U.S. Senate in late 1821, Van Buren had organized an impressive group of New York politicians later dubbed the Albany Regency.

After supporting William H. Crawford’s unsuccessful presidential candidacy in 1824, Van Buren put together a national political coalition that became the Democratic Party. This coalition threw its weight behind Andrew Jackson in 1828, helping him win the presidency. Jackson rewarded Van Buren, recently elected as New York’s governor, by appointing him U.S. secretary of state.

Van Buren proved to be adept at foreign relations. More importantly for his future political career, he was also the president’s staunchest ally in the cabinet. When internal dissension over the marriage of one of Jackson’s cabinet secretaries, Secretary of War John Eaton, threatened to tear the cabinet apart, Van Buren sacrificed his position by resigning. His immediate reward was a diplomatic appointment to London. More important was Jackson’s endorsement to become his vice president if he won reelection in 1832, which Jackson did. This decision positioned Van Buren to succeed him at the end of his second term. Van Buren spent most of his time as vice president advising Jackson on the Bank War, the president’s effort to close the Second Bank of the United States.

A Disappointing Presidency

After defeating his Whig opponents in the 1836 presidential election, Van Buren intended to continue enacting Jackson’s political agenda. He was able to do so in some cases. Van Buren oversaw the removal of the Cherokee Indians via the Trail of Tears and persisted in prosecuting the war against the Seminole Indians in Florida. He also continued supporting the institution of slavery in a bid to retain the political support of white southerners. Like Jackson, Van Buren also deferred a decision on the annexation of Texas.

The onset of the 1837 economic depression shortly after Van Buren took office, however, presented him with unexpected challenges. The changed economic circumstances facing the nation forced him to spend considerable time looking for a solution that would provide financial stability. Congress did not implement Van Buren’s proposal—housing federal dollars in an independent Treasury rather than a national bank or state banks—until the last year of his presidency when it passed the Independent Treasury Act of 1840.

Other circumstances provided Van Buren with the opportunity to prove his political acumen as chief executive. Conflicts along the U.S.-Canadian border threatened to ignite a yet another war with Great Britain. Van Buren refused to be provoked into taking aggressive military action, instead relying on diplomacy to defuse the tension. When asked to assist the Mormons in their request for compensation for property lost due to religious persecution, however, Van Buren chose to protect his electoral chances rather than provide them with support.

Political Defeat and Retirement

The 1840 presidential campaign exposed Van Buren’s (and the Democratic Party’s) many weaknesses. The Whig Party had spent the years since the last presidential election organizing its members in formidable ways, embracing the cultural politics—material, print, and visual culture, political events and music, public correspondence, auxiliary organizations, and women’s political activity—that Van Buren and many Democrats had never fully activated on a national scale. The Whigs were able to hammer the president on his weak, ineffective response to the economic depression and its effects on the American people.

The Whigs nominated a military hero, William Henry Harrison, and constructed an image of him as an ordinary farmer who understood the plight facing everyday Americans. Meanwhile, they portrayed Van Buren as an out-of-touch elitist living in luxury while average Americans suffered. Neither image was correct—Harrison came from wealth, while Van Buren did not—but in politics, perception often trumps reality.

Although Van Buren lost the 1840 presidential election, he was not yet done with presidential politics. He went into the 1844 Democratic National Convention as the favored candidate, but his opposition to immediately allowing Texas to join the United States sunk his chances of receiving the party’s presidential nomination. Then Van Buren’s attempt to influence President James Polk’s cabinet selections failed, leading to a break between the two men that was never repaired.

Four years later in 1848, the antislavery Free Soil Party nominated Van Buren to head its ticket. It was an odd political partnership given Van Buren’s leadership in the Democratic Party that he had founded and his historical support for slavery, and it showed in the ineffectiveness of his campaign.

Van Buren went back to the Democratic Party after 1848, acting as its elder statesman. With the help of two sons and a daughter-in-law, he worked on his memoirs and a study of U.S. political parties. He died at his home in Kinderhook, New York, in 1862.