Our Founding Fathers, who disagreed on so much, were of one mind on the subject of political parties. In his “Farewell Address,” written at the end of his 20 years of public life, George Washington warned the American people about those “potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people.” Even James Madison, who understood that the private interests of citizens were bound to clash, nevertheless believed that republics depended on disinterested men who would pursue the public good rather than factional interest. Those potent engines would tear the country apart.
The revolutionary generation has a way of regarding itself as the sole custodian of a nation’s interests. Mexico was governed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party for 70 years; India by the founding Congress Party for 30. Then new men, new ideas, new interests push to the fore, the uni-party moment comes to an end—and democracy survives perfectly well, thank you. The United States took a little more than 40 years to develop its first true political party. The politician who invented “the Democracy,” as that first true party called itself, was a new man named Martin Van Buren.
As we come to know him in James Bradley’s intriguing and incisive new biography, Van Buren was the right man at the right moment. He was born in 1782, just after the American Revolution, into an old, but not grand, Dutch family along the Hudson River in New York. His father was a tavernkeeper. Young Martin was a very bright, indifferently educated young man; Alexander Hamilton’s son James later said, “His knowledge of books outside of his profession was more limited than any other public man I ever knew.” But Van Buren knew his law books very well. A crackerjack advocate, he reached the top of the profession in the provincial capital of Hudson, then in Albany, and finally in Washington, D.C.
As both coauthor of the Van Buren Papers, an effort to catalog and digitize the former president’s writings, and a former political reporter for The Village Voice, James Bradley knows everything there is to know about Van Buren’s many sachems, rivals, and mentors-turned-rivals. He also has a finely honed instinct for the play of interest and ambition that ties these figures to one another. His Van Buren is an indefatigable operator who outworks and outthinks the opposition and attracts other bright young self-made fellows to his side. He watches, he plans, he springs traps. As a 30-year-old freshman legislator in Albany in 1812, Van Buren had already made such a name for himself that Governor DeWitt Clinton made him floor manager for the Republican presidential caucus in New York. Knowing full well that Clinton had to win every delegate to have a ghost of a chance of unseating the incumbent, James Madison, Van Buren arranged one proposed slate of electors after another, each of which the Madisonians rejected. In an act of sheer audacity, he proposed a slate consisting only of Clintonians. The Madisonians’ leader, outraged, slammed the door behind him. His bewildered charges fell into disarray and finally left their ballots blank. Clinton won all delegates, and then lost to Madison, as Van Buren knew he would. Of such moments of legerdemain are political reputations made.
By 1821, Van Buren had gotten himself elected (by the state legislature) to the U.S. Senate. He understood that a national figure could be no stronger than his standing at home. Clinton, who had returned to power, was now Van Buren’s only rival for control of Albany. A proposal for a constitutional convention, which Van Buren had previously opposed, now offered itself as the instrument for Clinton’s destruction. Van Buren staffed the convention with allies, who then proceeded to vote for the elimination of property restrictions on voting, filling the rolls with humble men who could be counted on to oppose the seigneurial Clinton. They abolished a key source of gubernatorial patronage and moved up the next election so that Clinton would immediately face a contest he couldn’t win. The governor announced that he was retiring from politics. Van Buren and his circle, collectively known as “the Albany Regency,” now controlled the biggest state in the country.
Van Buren was always of the party of the common man. His politics could be read as a campaign to build a coalition of Jeffersonians to dethrone the nation’s legacy class, still going by the increasingly archaic name of Federalists. Van Buren regarded President John Quincy Adams as the last remnant of a dying class, and lost no opportunity, and passed up no flimsy pretext, to ensure Adams’s failure. In 1827, Van Buren wrote a letter to a prominent Virginia editor proposing a coalition between “planters of the South and plain Republicans of the North.” Bradley generously interprets “planters” to mean “Jeffersonian yeomen” rather than “slaveholders,” which it plainly also meant. Though he regarded slavery as morally wrong, Van Buren was happy to treat it as a local concern of the South, as manufacturing was to New England. He added a characteristic insight: “Party attachment,” Van Buren argued, could supersede “sectional prejudices,” thus producing a truly national organization uniting different regions. Parties modernized politics.
By forging that coalition, Van Buren helped Andrew Jackson win his rematch with Adams in 1828. Party affiliation remained transitory and inchoate. But by 1832, Jackson, Van Buren, and their team had produced a real organization, with local “Hickory” clubs and big rallies featuring marching bands and even personal campaigning by the president. They now called themselves “Democrats.” The rival party, Henry Clay’s “National Republicans,” was forced to keep up, but did so less well. With Jackson’s smashing victory, a new political culture was born. The National Republicans would become the Whigs, and then the Republicans, producing the two-party system with which we have lived ever since.
After serving as Jackson’s running mate, Van Buren was elected president in 1836. He was not loved. The “Little Magician” was seen as a faithless conniver, a kind of Jacksonian epigone. The “little” epithet always dogged Van Buren, though he was, at five foot six, of average height for the time. Schemers seem smaller than they are. Van Buren had small plans. In a brief stint as New York governor he had proposed an immensely ambitious program of banking and electoral reform, but his Jeffersonian fear of an activist federal government ensured that he would venture little as president. Bradley makes a valiant effort to convince the reader that Van Buren’s single term in office was consequential; it wasn’t. Daniel Walker Howe, the great historian of the Whig era, offers a fitting epitaph: “Adept at gaining power, he proved largely unsuccessful in wielding it.”
The fun dissipates for the 50-odd pages that Bradley devotes to Van Buren’s presidency. America’s First Politician is an old-fashioned political biography, and Bradley becomes less compelling once Van Buren no longer has traps to set. He tends to scant the charm of vivid characterization. Only almost 400 pages in do we learn that the president did not swear or tell jokes and went up the stairs two at a time. Those details rivet our minds more firmly than the question of who screwed whom in the final version of the 1828 “tariff of abominations.”
Like John Quincy Adams, Van Buren remained a central figure in American politics during the long period (two decades, in his case) that followed his presidency. But unlike Adams, whose fervent and often solitary stand against the “slavocracy” earned him the love and respect he had never enjoyed as president, Van Buren could not shake his reputation as a master puppeteer. At length, his ambition slackened and he found the courage to stand up for his convictions even in the face of his political interests. In 1844, when he was hoping to regain the Democratic nomination, Van Buren came out against the annexation of Texas as an imperialist venture unworthy of a republic. This was, he knew, heresy for the Democrats, who hoped to break up Texas into a cluster of slave states and thus tip the balance of power in the union.
Four years later, Van Buren finally stopped pussyfooting on slavery, arguing that Congress had the obligation to ban the abhorrent practice in the new territories in the west and southwest. In 1848, the 66-year-old ex-president allowed himself to become the candidate of the antislavery Free Soil Party, precisely the kind of single-issue, regional grouping he had warned against two decades before. For once he seemed to be acting out of belief rather than ambition. Van Buren won 10 percent of the vote and no states, which was probably about what he had predicted. This was a man whose judgment never deserted him.
“Founder of the party system” might not sound like a heroic epithet just now, when one of our parties has degenerated into a personality cult and the other is in disarray. But while Van Buren was not a heroic figure, he was a necessary one. America’s First Politician reminds us that democracies survive not because citizens sacrifice their interests in the name of the public good, as the Federalists insisted they do, but because organized groupings called parties effectively represent those interests. Parties are a fallen institution, but we are, after all, fallen beings.
