Martin Van Buren
Martin Van Buren invented the political party as Americans now understand it, and then lost the presidency to the first campaign that used one against him. He was born in a Dutch-speaking village in the Hudson valley, the son of a tavern keeper, and was the first president born under the flag rather than as a British subject. He had no college education and made his way through the New York bar and then through the state's factional politics, where he assembled the organisation known as the Albany Regency - a disciplined machine of newspapers, patronage and caucus that could deliver a state reliably. His genuine innovation was the argument underneath it. The founders had regarded parties as a disease; Van Buren argued that permanent, organised, competing parties were the only thing that could hold a continental republic together, because they forced politicians from different sections to negotiate before an election rather than fight after one. He built the Democratic Party around Andrew Jackson on that theory, served as his secretary of state and then his vice president, and was elected to succeed him in 1836. He took office five weeks before the credit system collapsed. The Panic of 1837 was the worst depression the country would see before 1929: banks suspended payment, cotton and land prices fell by half, and unemployment in the cities ran for years. Van Buren's response was orthodox and unhelpful. He held that the government's business was not to relieve distress, blamed the banks, and spent his term securing an Independent Treasury that would keep federal money out of them altogether. It passed in 1840 and did nothing for anybody's wages. Two other things marked the term. He kept Texas out of the Union rather than reopen the question of slavery and provoke a war with Mexico, which was the most restrained decision any president made in that decade. And he carried through the removal his predecessor had ordered: in 1838 soldiers drove the Cherokee west at bayonet point, and something like a quarter of them died on the way. He lost in 1840 to a campaign of log cabins and cider that used his own methods better than he did, and ran again in 1848 on an anti-slavery ticket that split New York and handed the election to the Whigs.
- Lived: 1782 CE – 1862 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
