by Ted Widmer
For all his pretended rusticity, Van Buren was incapable of inactivity, and if he was unable to reshape the country, then he continued to mold Lindenwald to his peculiar taste. The farmers of Kinderhook must have been shocked when he introduced the radical concept of the indoor toilet, and visitors to this day can see how elaborate that contraption must have seemed when it was installed with great ceremony inside the mansion. Van Buren kept current with politics, thanks to his newspapers and informants, but after the epic struggle of 1848 he retreated, as if chagrined by the boldness he had displayed in challenging the Democratic orthodoxy. He came back into the fold, supported the 1850 compromise engineered by his friend Henry Clay, and stood with the party again in 1852, even though it had hardly cleansed itself of its pro-slavery acolytes. Throughout the 1850s, as the crisis intensified, Van Buren generally approved the moderate position associated with younger politicians like Stephen Douglas—appalled by slavery, but reluctant to attack it in the bolder language being used by former Free Soilers as they assembled under the new banner of the Republican Party. Van Buren had only so much revolution in him. In 1858 he told a visitor, “I have nothing to modify or change. The end of slavery will come—amid terrible convulsion, I fear, but it will come.”
In fairness, he had other problems on his mind. His four sons still occupied much of his time, not always happily. At a time in his life when he might have expected dependency to flow in the other direction, he was often called upon to support them. Smith Van Buren had moved to Lindenwald with his three children in 1849, as his wife lay dying of consumption, and oversaw the extensive renovations to the house performed by Richard Upjohn. Young Martin, who had served his father faithfully as a private secretary for years, now gave signs of a health crisis that would require serious medical attention and extensive, even desperate, travel to foreign climates. For all his talents, John Van Buren never overcame his private demons, and though he was mentioned as a candidate for vice president in 1852, his support generally eroded among a welter of rumors about his taste for nightlife.
Van Buren remained a pillar of strength to those around him. The diarist Philip Hone likened his face to “the unruffled surface of a majestic river, which covers rocks and whirlpools, but shows no marks of agitation beneath.” That imperturbability—so useful throughout his career in the cauldron of democracy—was confirmed by a small cluster of daguerreotypes he sat for in his declining years. The technology had appeared during his presidency, and now he allowed it to capture him for the ages. While a certain stolid fortitude was always evident in Van Buren portraiture, the images of the 1850s indicate an increasingly spectral figure, a cherubic face surrounded by wisps of white hair, including sideburns that never seemed to stop growing. Herman Melville, whose brother had been a leading supporter of Van Buren, never lost his fear that photography robbed something from the soul—to sit for a photograph, in his opinion, was to be “oblivionated.” These final images of Van Buren, fading like a negative exposed to daylight, suggest that Melville was on to something.
But before oblivion settled upon him, he had some final business to attend to.
Van Buren had always enjoyed history—his obsession with Jefferson and strong memories of Hamilton and Burr show that he felt himself to be part of a continuum of sorts—and now that he had time on his hands, he began to look to history again for consolation. When his old friend Thomas Hart Benton, the fiery senator from Missouri, began to write his magnificent Thirty Years’ View—arguably the finest political memoir ever written in this country—Van Buren helped considerably with his comments and recollections. When Alexander Hamilton’s son John undertook an ambitious biography of his father, he came to Van Buren for help sorting through Hamilton’s career in New York politics and his tortured relationship with Jefferson. In the 1850s, as the Constitution came under intense scrutiny for its intentions regarding slavery, Van Buren was increasingly looked to as a rare person with immediate recollections of the giants who built the nation. Finally, after years of insecurity about his educational attainments, he had become the Sage of Lindenwald.
Inevitably, these thoughts about history turned to the complicated question of his own mortality, and how he wished to be remembered. The past was everywhere in Kinderhook, and an obscure history of the town records that Van Buren spent noticeable time in local cemeteries, visiting in particular the grave of a woman he had once loved: “There is an abiding tradition of the grave of yet another, in a private burial plot three miles from the village, which he was wont to visit occasionally and stand reverently beside it with hat in hand.” The same history offers a tantalizing morsel about his personal life as well: “Some of us know of one of Kinderhook’s estimable and cultivated women who declined to marry the ex-President.” Her name and story are, alas, lost to the historical record.1
To keep his own story from disappearing, and to achieve the peculiar immortality we reserve for the writers of very long books that are never checked out of the library, Van Buren turned to the great challenge of writing his autobiography. Jabez Hammond, the historian of New York politics, presciently urged him to describe things “as they were not as they ought to have been”—good advice for us all. He commenced the project in earnest in 1854, as he traveled around Europe with his sick son, Martin. It would have been difficult to find a more unlikely place to begin than Sorrento, where the tiny ex-presidential entourage arrived in June of 1854—but maybe Sorrento’s distance from Kinderhook was exactly what opened the floodgates of his memory. Once the words came, they came in a torrent, written hastily in his unreadable handwriting, and describing the thousands of political calculations that had propelled his career forward in the early days of the republic. The autobiography would occupy him for years, along with his history of political parties—a subject that was close to his heart. Although he never exactly finished the memoir (to do so would be to admit the end was near, as Ulysses Grant proved when he expired upon completing his manuscript), he poured considerable energy into the effort. The result was a wandering account that focused too much on some episodes (his embassy to England) and too little on others (how he formed the party, how he sabotaged Calhoun, his presidency), but provided fascinating insights into the period.
Van Buren wrote another valedictory of sorts in 1858 when he composed a solicitous, twenty-page letter to his son John about his political prospects. Although John’s fortunes were on the wane, Van Buren had limitless hopes for him and urged him to take a series of steps that would put him in a favorable position for the presidency. The letter is fascinating to read not only to see Van Buren as a parent (and a rather delusional one, given the unlikelihood of John’s ascent) but also to glimpse the ambition that had powered his own difficult rise to the summit. He insisted on the great value of hard work for any successful candidate, and the importance, paradoxically, of not appearing to be trying too hard for the post. In what must have been a self-reflective comment, he warned him strenuously against becoming a “professional” politician: “There is no ‘one’ in whose pockets the people are so prone to pour lead, as a man who pursues politics for a living. They soon come to regard him as a wanton upon Providence, and are constantly disposed to show him the cold shoulder. Although many make their living by it, they get it by hook or crook, and no public honors sit well upon them.” Finally, he urged him to stay away from the petty deals over patronage that had occupied so much of his own time. With the voice of a seasoned politician, he wrote his son: “None of these things pay in any way. Seven out of ten of those you benefit will prove ungrateful, all of your opponents will be vindictive, you will fritter away your strength, and worry yourself to no purpose by caring about, and still more by meddling in any of these matters.”
That same year, he was thrown from a galloping horse, but he emerged from the accident unscathed. The veteran of more than one tussle wrote a friend, “Does this not speak well of my skull?” The Civil War was another body blow, but Van Buren accepted it with the equanimity
that had distinguished his entire career. He used all of his influence to prevent the secession of the Southern states, voiced some anti-extremist opinions directed to both sides, and proposed a constitutional convention as a last resort. But when push came to shove, this lifelong disciple of Jeffersonian democracy and lover of the South stood unwaveringly by Abraham Lincoln and the Union. When Franklin Pierce asked Van Buren to lead a meeting of ex-presidents to call for peace, Van Buren smelled disunion and would have none of it. Before a worried group of Kinderhook burghers, he gave his clear opinion: “The attack upon our flag and the capture of Fort Sumter by the Secessionists could be regarded in no other light than as the commencement of a treasonable attempt to overthrow the Federal Government by military force.” His call to the New York Democracy to support Lincoln came at an important time, and did not go unappreciated by the beleaguered new president.
When Walt Whitman, walking down Broadway one April evening in 1861, heard that war had broken out, he was so stunned that he resolved to drink only water and milk, as if his constitution was somehow tied to the nation’s. Similarly, Van Buren’s health declined rapidly with the onset of hostilities. He lingered into the war’s second year, and then expired at 2 a.m. on July 24, 1862, a day and a half after Lincoln read the first draft of his Emancipation Proclamation to a startled cabinet. Van Buren could hardly have chosen his entrance and exit more dramatically. Born to the Revolution that created this country, he died a casualty of the Civil War that nearly destroyed it. One hopes that he knew the Union would prevail, and there is much in his optimistic life to suggest that he would have taken such a view, but it is impossible to say with certainty.
Lincoln returned the favor of Van Buren’s support with a more than gracious statement of presidential sorrow over the departure of his predecessor:
Washington, July 25, 1862
The President with deep regret announces to the people of the United States the decease, at Kinderhook, N.Y., on the 24th Instant, of his honored predecessor Martin Van Buren.
This event will occasion mourning in the nation for the loss of a citizen and a public servant whose memory will be gratefully cherished. Although it has occurred at a time when his country is afflicted with division and civil war, the grief of his patriotic friends will measurably be assuaged by the consciousness that while suffering with disease and seeing his end approaching his prayers were for the restoration of the authority of the Government of which he had been the head and for peace and good will among his fellow-citizens.
Lincoln then ordered the ceremonial rituals, which again exceeded what might have been expected. The entire government, save the military, closed the next day, and flags were displayed at half-staff. At dawn thirteen guns were fired, and then a single gun every thirty minutes until sunset, when thirty-four guns were fired, in tribute to all of the United States, including those in rebellion. Van Buren would have appreciated that. For six months following his death, through some of the bloodiest fighting of the war (Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg), all officers in the U.S. Army and Navy wore black crape on their left arms in tribute to the eighth president. Thus Abraham Lincoln completed the unlikely friendship that had begun that night on the prairie in 1842 when he and Van Buren had told uproarious political stories late into the night.
If Kinderhook had ignored Van Buren on his way up, it corrected the mistake on his way out. The funeral was the grandest event in the history of the town. Services were held first at Lindenwald and then in the village church where his ancestors had worshipped. According to the local paper, thousands stood outside. His pallbearers were fourteen friends from Kinderhook, most with Dutch patronyms. After a series of sermons, the “thronging multitude” passed the casket before it was taken away in a procession led by Engine Company No. 2, including eighty-one carriages and an endless line of political dignitaries, clerics, and the small fry Van Buren would have appreciated the most.
There the story might have ended, except for the fact that Van Buren refused to die. Long after his demise, his publishing career followed a strange logic of its own. In 1867, five years after the funeral, his first book was published, the Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States. It is a learned work, deeply immersed in the rivalry between Jefferson and Hamilton, but less forthright about the struggles of his own generation. Fifty-three years later, in 1920, the companion volume appeared, his long-awaited Autobiography of Martin Van Buren. It was not exactly a book to launch the Jazz Age, but the miracle is perhaps that it made it into print at all.
His biographies appeared equally erratically. First out of the box was a sensitive short portrait by William Allen Butler, the son of Van Buren’s old partner, entitled Martin Van Buren: Lawyer, Statesman and Man (1862). But even at a moment when one might have expected interest in the just-departed president, Butler confessed that “he goes unnoticed.” Twenty-seven years later (1889), at the end of a very long life, the great nineteenth-century historian George Bancroft added another volume to the pile when he wrote Martin Van Buren to the End of His Public Career. From the unenticing title to the book’s timing, it was a spectacularly bad idea. What vestigial debt, lost to memory, was Bancroft trying to pay? He must have known that no one would read it, but he wrote it anyway, fulfilling an old promise to the Democratic chieftain, and perhaps to himself as well. The 1930s saw a brief resurgence of interest—perhaps because of the Depression, the New Deal, and curiosity about antecedents to the great coalition FDR was building. In 1945, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Age of Jackson paid serious attention to Van Buren, tying Jackson to Roosevelt and Van Buren to both. But to this day, there have been sufficiently few biographies of Martin Van Buren that a reader with time on his hands (and what other kind of Van Buren acolyte is there?) can reasonably expect to read every work on Van Buren ever written—something that would be impossible to say about the other giants of the early republic.
Van Buren lived as well in the memories of his younger friends in politics. A number of former Democrats and Van Buren Free Soilers populated Lincoln’s inner circle, including the Blairs (Frank and Montgomery), Gideon Welles, and Vice President Hannibal Hamlin. Perhaps his most direct heir was Samuel Tilden, a young man he had helped and who became one of his closest friends. Tilden, no mean politician in his own right, became the governor of New York and the Democratic candidate for president in 1876. That bitterly contested election, which in many ways presaged the turmoil of 2000, ended in agonizing defeat for Tilden after a highly partisan commission awarded contested votes from Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon to Rutherford B. Hayes (Tilden won the popular vote by 250,000). One suspects that if Van Buren had been there to count the votes, the election might have turned out differently. Tilden went on to amass a great fortune, most of which he left to what became the New York Public Library. That irreplaceable edifice remains a tribute not only to Tilden but to the political mentor who discovered him. Van Buren always had an eye for young talent.
Van Buren also lived on, as all presidents do, in the world of gossip, innuendo, and half-truth that lurk in the shadows behind any important leader, especially one who disturbs the status quo. Near the end of his life, at the end of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman remembered Van Buren fondly as a “brilliant manager,” though not quite Lincolnesque. He also added the confused recollection that John Van Buren was the illegitimate son of Aaron Burr. Nor was Whitman the only poet who dilated on the eighth president. Improbably, well into the twentieth century the great modernist Ezra Pound developed a literary crush on Van Buren, in one of the strangest artist-muse relationships in the history of creative expression. “Canto 37” of his Seventy Cantos is a long-winded poetic exploration of the issues surrounding the Panic of 1837, with some sections drawing upon Van Buren’s autobiography (written “in the vicinage of Vesuvius, in the mirror of memory”). It ends with an ecstatic Latinate celebration of the man Pound considered the author of economic freedom in America: “
HIC JACET FISCI LIBERATOR” (here lies the liberator of money). Pound also wrote elsewhere that Van Buren was a “national hero” offering one of the “few clean and decent pages” in the history of the United States.
It is hard to say whether Pound’s advocacy helped or hurt Van Buren. It is safe to say that there were not many other modernist poets clamoring to defend him, or to attack him for that matter, and any attention helped. But Pound’s later zeal for Benito Mussolini did not do much to promote his reputation as a shrewd judge of character. In fact, his emotional embrace of Van Buren may have helped Pound more than it helped anyone else, because it offered convincing proof, as his defenders later claimed, that the poet was completely insane.
Finally, Van Buren lived on in the world where he was most comfortable: the political realm. Though his specific deeds were soon forgotten, the same battles he fought were repeated again and again over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In every generation, champions of the people fought against the encroachments of corporations and malefactors of great wealth, and through most of these struggles, the modern Democratic Party that Van Buren had invented was a crucial instrument in the struggle. Franz Kafka, in his essay “The Great Wall of China,” described a man-made structure so extensive and piecemeal that it could never be finished, and would require generations to complete, by which time the original plans would have been altered beyond recognition. Martin Van Buren’s party shares a few of those characteristics.
