Martin Van Buren

by Ted Widmer

  Once the campaign was under way, the Democrats tried their best, but they simply failed to match the enthusiasm of their opponents. Around the nation, orators defended Van Buren as the simple champion of democracy, or as “the pilot that weathered the storm!,” the stout defender of “the sober second thought of the people.” But the times demanded a more sophisticated response and a sexier slogan. He had none to offer. He certainly worked hard, and set an important precedent by giving obvious campaign speeches at ceremonial events around the country. For the first time, a president was striving openly for reelection, breaking a taboo that would remain in place until the early twentieth century.

  The result, which came in November, was a foregone conclusion. Van Buren won only six states—Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Illinois, and New Hampshire—and New York was not one of them. The Whigs won the presidency and both Houses of Congress—in other words, everything. And they did it in impressive fashion, generating so much excitement that 80 percent of the voting population (all white males) cast ballots. Van Buren won 60 votes (1.1 million popular) to 234 for Harrison (1.3 million popular). The publicity machine they had built crowed its exultation, with headlines like “The Country Saved!” and “Van Burenism Lies Prostrate in the Dust,” so much so that James Silk Buckingham was distressed for American democracy. He pondered the problem in his journal: “The language here used would induce any stranger to suppose that the party in power were absolute tyrants, ruling by virtue of divine right, and in no way responsible to the people; and the rebuking parties were democrats, and friends of liberty and free institutions. But the fact is just the reverse of this.” Not for the first time, a candidate had been elected who bore little resemblance to the person described on handbills around the country.

  John Quincy Adams may have been gratified by the result, but he, too, was disturbed by the way it had been achieved, through chicanery and cheap political slogans and unchecked hostility between the parties. He considered it a “revolution in the habits and manners of the people,” and being an Adams, he worried about what it portended for the future. “Their manifest tendency is to civil war,” he concluded glumly. Some—those who won—saw it as the vindication of democracy. But the tawdriness of this campaign, with its false claims and easy sound bites, signaled what Henry Adams would later call the degradation of the democratic dogma. Out on the Illinois prairie, a young friend of Lincoln’s, Albert T. Bledsoe, worried that “pandemonium had been let loose upon earth.”

  For all the noise and heat generated by the 1840 campaign, its most lasting legacy may have been one of the shortest words in the English language. In the spring of 1839, the phrase “OK” began to circulate in Boston as shorthand for “oil korrect,” a slangy way of saying “all right.” Early in 1840, Van Buren’s supporters began to use the trendy expression as a way to identify their candidate, whom they labored to present as “Old Kinderhook,” perhaps in imitation of Jackson’s Old Hickory. Van Buren even wrote “OK” next to his signature. It spread like wildfire, and to this day it is a universal symbol of something elemental in the American character—informality, optimism, efficiency, call it what you will. It is spoken seven times a day by the average citizen, two billion utterances overall. And, of course, it goes well beyond our borders; if there is a single sound America has contributed to the esperanto of global communication, this is it. It is audible everywhere—in a taxicab in Paris, in a café in Istanbul, in the languid early seconds of the Beatles’ “Revolution,” when John Lennon steps up to the microphone and arrestingly calls the meeting to order. There are worse legacies that a defeated presidential candidate could claim.

  After losing, Van Buren still had to deliver his final message to Congress. Jabez Hammond summed it up well at the time:

  But, though defeated, Mr. Van Buren was not conquered. His last message contained a calm and dignified retrospect of his administration. He exhibited a clear view of our foreign relations, and showed them to be in a most happy, honorable and prosperous condition. He gave a history of the embarrassments which the government had been obliged to encounter, in consequence of the failure of the banks to perform their engagements. He insisted that the course he had recommended was the only one that could have been adopted, except that of incorporating a bank of the United States; he denounced that measure as unconstitutional, and as one which had been repeatedly repudiated by the people of the nation. He urged economy in the public expenditures; he showed that expenditures for ordinary purposes had been greatly diminished during his administration; he contended that the revenue of the government, without an increase of taxes, would be sufficient to defray all the necessary expenses; and he protested against the creation of a national debt. Although he left the enemy in possession of the field of battle, he himself retired from the arena in the spirit and with the dignity of a conqueror.

  That was probably too generous a description. In truth, Van Buren was defeated, and badly. He would never hold elective office again; his career ended as prematurely as it had begun. The winds of fortune blow very strong in American politics. But despite a presidency that was disappointing in many ways, he could return to New York satisfied that he had remained true to his understanding of the Democracy, imperfect as that may have been, and that most others would have fared worse under the difficult circumstances he had faced. In fact, many were about to, as the United States entered the dreariest presidential season in its history, a twenty-year drought that did not end until the watershed of the 1860 election.

  Van Buren shivered through the same damp inaugural ceremony that elevated and killed William Henry Harrison, and then made his way north, to the home state he had not lived in for twenty years. He arrived by ship at Manhattan, and found a surprise that must have warmed his jaded heart. A huge number of the city’s poor came out in the rain to greet him, conscious that, for all his imperfections, this New Yorker had somewhere represented their interests in a government where they had precious few allies. There is no better way to describe the scene, and how deeply it must have moved Van Buren, than to quote from the sputtering remarks an angry Whig (George Templeton Strong) wrote in his diary, indignant at Van Buren and the leveling energy he still possessed, despite losing everything.

  March 23. Had to wait half an hour in the drizzle at the corner of Rector Street and Broadway while Matty’s triumphal procession was going up. A disgusting assemblage of the unwashed democracy they were, generally speaking, a more rowdy, draggletailed, jailbird-resembling gang of truculent loafers than the majority of them I never witnessed before. Considering the rain, they turned out in force—and the rain, by the by, was a blessing to some of them, for the ablution was badly needed. Butler boys on horseback—there was an unlimited number of them. Carts with twenty little blackguards sticking to each, a dozen grand marshals with chapeaux and swords galloping about and getting into everybody’s way in the intensity of their excitement, several very formidable brass bands, divers gorgeous banners, and so forth, with a great predominance of pedestrians from the neighborhood of the Points apparently, passed one; and then came the triumphal car, to wit, a shabby barouche and four with Matty himself, hat in hand, looking as happy as a man could be expected to in the rain without hat or umbrella. He looks older than I supposed.

  8

  Resurgemus

  If Van Buren had lost America, he still owned New York, and he stayed in Manhattan for a few weeks after his tumultuous return, attending receptions and plays and upholding his penchant for high living. Appropriately, he also went to church, where he was again observed by the ubiquitous diarist George Templeton Strong:

  Matty Van Buren was there, in the pew of his brother president, Duer of Columbia College, and by a curious coincidence the subject of the sermon was the spiritual blessings that flow from retiracy and seclusion from the busy world and the cares of active life. If I wasn’t nearsighted I’ve no doubt I should have observed Matty wince considerably.

  Inevitably, Van Buren ran
out of reasons to put off “retiracy,” and so he finally wended his way up the Hudson to Kinderhook. He arrived there on May 8, 1841, setting off something like pandemonium, or as near to it as Dutch farmers could get. Early in the afternoon, a “numerous and respectable portion of the citizens” assembled at the steamboat wharf to receive their most famous son. When his boat came into view, an artillery piece began firing and did not stop until he reached the wharf, at which point the local brass band added to the din. A carriage hastily took him to the village, where cannons were fired, bells rung, and a series of long speeches offered to “a large assemblage” with “a goodly number of ladies.” Finally, Van Buren took the rostrum and profusely thanked “the Democracy of my native county” for their welcome. He once again defended his fiscal policies, denying any regret, and insisting, in characteristically long sentences, that he would do it all exactly the same if he could. Following his speech, his old friend Benjamin Butler stood up and reminded the crowd of the unending series of adversities that Van Buren had stared down since his childhood in the small town that now turned out for him. It was, in the language of the day, “a spectacle which made the hearts of all present, of every party, throb with proud exultation.”

  From there it was on to Lindenwald, the large home on the outskirts of town that Van Buren, ever careful, had bought in 1839 in case the White House was no longer available. There must have been satisfaction in knowing that the house had originally belonged to the Van Ness family, one of the powerful clans that had tried to block Van Buren’s rise. But perhaps that was also a source of lingering insecurity, judging by the frenzy with which he set out redecorating the place to better fit his questionable taste. Over the next decade, a handsome eighteenth-century dwelling was transformed into an ornate Venetian doge’s palace, complete with a four-story loggia tower to survey the Van Buren lands and the visitors, who did not seem to be coming as frequently as one might have expected. While it was not quite the worst building of the nineteenth century, it demonstrated one of our most impressive traits as a people—the ability to disregard all rules of architectural propriety and build McMonuments to ourselves. Lindenwald fit squarely in the long continuum joining Monticello and Graceland.

  Safely ensconced in his country seat, Van Buren now had to confront the same existential problem that so many ex-presidents have faced, before and since. How exactly does one fill up the time after having been retired by the people, a little too soon? As a relatively young ex-president at fifty-eight, he must have felt no little sense of dislocation. Like Rip Van Winkle, Van Buren was now awkwardly repatriated to the small village that he had fled all those years ago. How exotic he must have seemed to Kinderhook, and vice versa. At the beginning of 1841, he was directing a powerful economy, taking steps to avert foreign conflict, overseeing thousands of federal employees, and managing the affairs of a huge national party. A few months later, he was watching his potatoes grow and wondering about crop rotation.

  Typically, Van Buren wasted little time on self-reflection, and threw himself into his new life as a rural squire—the role that all early American presidents claimed to love but which none except Washington actually sought. He worked the fields himself, improved his farmland by building dams and orchards, spoke Dutch with his old friends, and surprised the local farmers with his agricultural energy. At the same time, he maintained some of the habits he had formed in Washington, reading extensively, writing letters, and entertaining often (he spent about twice as much on butter, wine, and champagne as he did on taxes and church). Three of his four sons lived in close proximity, and a grandson was born that first summer on the farm. Van Buren claimed, perhaps sincerely, that he had “never spent as pleasant a summer.”

  * * *

  Still, as he gazed at the prints of Jefferson and Jackson on his wall, Van Buren remained conscious that a new election was approaching in 1844, and that he might very well be the candidate again. It was encouraging that things were going badly for the Whigs—President Harrison had died a month after taking office, and President Tyler, a former Democrat, was distrusted on both sides of the aisle. Inevitably, Van Buren’s thoughts turned to reclaiming what had been taken from him.

  In the time-honored Van Buren tradition, he began his campaign with a journey, reminiscent of the long trips he had taken when orchestrating the creation of the Democratic Party. In early 1842, not even a year after his removal, Van Buren set out one more time from Kinderhook, determined to renew his acquaintance with the American people. It was an extraordinary pilgrimage, worthy of Ulysses, which exceeded all of his earlier ones, and included every region of what was by now a much bigger country. As usual, he started by heading toward the North Star of presidential politics—the South. From New York, he went to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston, the beginning of several weeks in South Carolina with allies and in-laws. From there he traveled overland through Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to New Orleans for the first time. Then it was up the Mississippi to Memphis, and across Tennessee to visit Jackson at his home, the Hermitage. It was a welcome reunion for the two old gamecocks, and Jackson was especially gratified that the Southwest could see Van Buren as he had seen him—“a plain man of middle size, plain and affable,” not “a dwarf Dutchman” or “a little dandy who you might lift in a bandbox.”

  From the Jackson summit Van Buren headed through Kentucky, where he saw Clay, and into the Old Northwest, where he became the first current or former president to visit the rapidly growing city of Chicago. On his way there, in the middle of June 1842, poor roads forced him to stop in the small town of Rochester, Illinois, for one of the most memorable nights of his trip. A group of local officials, desperate to please Van Buren in this accidental location, brought along the funniest raconteur in the vicinity, overlooking the fact that his politics were all wrong (Whig), and that he had been acting erratically due to a severe personal crisis over whether to marry or not.

  All evening, the young Abraham Lincoln and Martin Van Buren delighted each other with their stories. Van Buren took the crowd back to his earliest days in New York politics, when Hamilton and Burr circled each other. According to a lucky witness, Lincoln responded with an endless supply of stories, “one following another in rapid succession, each more irresistible than its predecessor. The fun continued until after midnight, and until the distinguished traveler insisted that his sides were sore from laughing.” Van Buren later claimed that he had never “spent so agreeable a night in my life.” That is no small claim from someone who had been listening to and telling the tallest tales in American politics for more than three decades. His early memories embraced long conversations with the founders, as he strained to inherit the mantle of their greatness. Now, in a very different role, he was able to see something of America’s future as well. Lincoln, too, must have taken something from his first close encounter with the presidency. They could not have been more different—in their politics, their appearance, and their positions in the trajectory of life—and yet Lincoln and Van Buren shared a great deal as well. Their evening together, two ships passing in the prairie night, offers one of the more intriguing chance meetings in American history.

  Van Buren finally returned home on July 28, 1842, having traveled more than seven thousand miles and shaken two hundred thousand hands. He had shored up his credentials, renewed his ties with local bosses, and emerged deeply energized by his contact with the far-flung American people. He was, in other words, a most obvious candidate for someone who still claimed, coyly, not to be a candidate. Soon, the old publicity mill he had created would bring out articles demanding his return. The Democratic Review even published a sonnet to him that bears notice, if only for the fact that it was the only work of poetry devoted to Van Buren until Ezra Pound developed his unlikely fascination a century later. “Fallen?,” it began. “No, thou art not!,” came the emphatic response.

  * * *

  But subtle changes in the political situation and in Van Buren himself indicated that th
e 1844 campaign would be different from the ones he had run before. The exuberance of the reception he had received in town after town emboldened him, and his time in the Northwest deepened his aversion to slavery. In letters to his closest friends, a note of irritation toward the South began to creep in that had never been clearly stated before. Remembering the countless times he had thanklessly defended slavery and Indian removal, Van Buren now seemed to be recovering a lost anger that he had always suppressed in pursuit of his grand political strategy.

  But the South, of course, was not inclined to let him off that easily. Calhoun also worked throughout 1843 to gain the nomination, renewing a rivalry that now stretched more than two decades. Even more dangerously, Texas came back into sharp focus in early 1844, forcing all candidates to declare whether they were for or against annexation, and by extension whether they wanted to alienate a huge swath of the North or the South. Again, Calhoun was at the center of things—as secretary of state under John Tyler, he had pressed hard for adding Texas to the South and the Union, in roughly that order.

  There were a number of very good reasons to oppose taking Texas, despite our general belief today that American expansion was inevitable, virtuous, and foreordained. The United States had entered several prior treaties that recognized Mexico’s sovereignty over Texas, and many experts felt that it was simply illegal to accept a disputed foreign province into the United States. Worse, it could lead to war. There was also a serious moral argument against annexation, in that it would reintroduce slavery where it no longer existed. Calhoun made no bones about it: he wanted Texas to come into the Union so that slavery, a positive good, might be extended and protected from British attempts to suppress it. This was a bitter pill for many Northerners to swallow—and the enormity of Texas also threatened to alter the delicate North-South balance in Congress.