Martin Van Buren

Martin Van Buren (1782-1862) was the eighth president of the United States, serving from 1837 to 1841. A co-founder of the Democratic Party with Andrew Jackson, he had earlier been Jackson's secretary of state and vice president.

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Biography

Martin Van Buren was born in 1782 in Kinderhook, New York, a largely Dutch-speaking village, and is the only president who spoke English as a second language. After village schooling and brief study of Latin he trained as a lawyer and entered politics as a Democratic-Republican. He served as surrogate of Columbia County, won a seat in the New York State Senate in 1813 and was state attorney general from 1815 to 1819.

Leading the Bucktail faction, he built the political machine known as the Albany Regency and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1821. In 1828 he ran for governor of New York to help Andrew Jackson carry the state, then resigned within weeks to become Jackson's secretary of state, where he helped shape the new Democratic Party. He left the cabinet in 1831 to help settle the Petticoat affair, served briefly as minister to Britain, and was elected vice president in 1832.

Van Buren won the presidency in 1836, but the Panic of 1837 struck soon after he took office. His remedy, an Independent Treasury that kept federal money out of private banks, was held up by Congress until 1840, and his term was also marked by the Second Seminole War and his refusal to annex Texas as a slave state. He lost re-election to William Henry Harrison in 1840.

His opposition to Texas annexation cost him the Democratic nomination in 1844. In 1848 he ran for president as the nominee of the anti-slavery Free Soil Party, then returned to the Democrats. He supported the Union during the Civil War and died at Kinderhook in 1862.