I started a new full-time job last month, so I have fallen behind on my reading and blogging. It's probably been a month or more since I finished my chosen Martin Van Buren biography. I hate to give short shrift to an already forgotten past president and first lady, but I need to power through this mostly-from-memory blog before the holiday rush really sets in.
I learned basically nothing about either Van Buren's wife or his acting first lady from reading his biography. He married his cousin, Hannah Hoes, partly because Kinderhook, New York, was such an exclusively Dutch part of the state that Van Buren, though born in the United States, spoke Dutch as his first language and was criticized by some as too foreign to be president. The community was tightly interrelated. They quickly made a family, but Hannah died nearly two decades before Martin became president. The most important thing I remember about Angelica Singleton Van Buren, his daughter-in-law who helped complete some of the first lady functions in the absence of a president's wife, is that she was a Southerner who complimented the Southern visiting and socializing that Van Buren used as part of his political networking and strategy.
Van Buren was a single-term president because he was forced to take the blame for the Panic of 1837, which hit just months after his inauguration, the complicated result of unregulated economic practices set in motion well before he took the executive office. And while Van Buren continued to hold political influence after finishing his presidential term, including a second campaign for the presidency, his most significant impact on American political history perhaps happened well before he held the highest office in the land. Basically, while Andrew Jackson is most often given credit for creating the modern Democratic Party because he was the first President elected by it, Van Buren is, in fact, the figure who deserves that credit because of all the organizing he did behind the scenes to create the coalition that would become the party. Basically, Van Buren spent years putting in the muscle to organize people into this new kind of political grouping that held power to elect and sway officials. He began locally in New York, then traveled across the country, pulling people into this political organization that supported a kind of Jeffersonian democracy that extended from the rural planter to the urban worker while also getting behind federal government projects enough to appease westerners like Jackson who wanted to see United States expansion. Basically, by putting the weight of his name and his organization behind Andrew Jackson for president, Martin Van Buren created the modern Democratic Party.
Van Buren also helped define a modern understanding of federal spending, limiting it to projects that specifically spanned more than one state, leaving in-state projects to the states themselves. Van Buren continued the Indian removals put in motion by Andrew Jackson, and he once owned a slave who ran away. Van Buren held complicated, sometimes contradictory, opinions about slavery and abolition. Much of what he said while in the political spotlight was so non-committal it could be used by either side. As every president before him, he refused to tackle to the issue of slavery in any substantive way, but Van Buren eventually took a stand wholly against admitting new slave states into the Union, ending any chances of his political re-election and predicting a civil war if the country did not heed his warning.
Our eighth president certainly led a more interesting life than I expected from a one-term president who has been largely forgotten to history. I just wish we could learn more about the ladies in his life.
