Martin Van Buren

Dutch was the language at home in Kinderhook, and English something Van Buren picked up at the village school. His father, by the 1790 census, enslaved six people, which made him one of the larger slaveholders in a small New York town. The schooling stopped at 14. Van Buren swept out a law office, copied documents for six years, finished his training in New York City, and reached the bar in 1803 at 20. He stood five feet six, went red at the temples early, and was already unreadable across a table. In 1807 he married Hannah Hoes, a cousin he had known his whole life and who also spoke Dutch.

What followed was an unbroken ladder: state senator, attorney general of New York, United States senator, governor for less than three months, secretary of state, minister to Britain until the Senate refused to confirm him, vice president. Then four years of his own, wrecked in the opening weeks by a bank panic and ended by an opponent who campaigned on log cabins and cider. BriefHistory has the depression, the independent treasury and the rout of 1840. What it has no room for is the man who wrote 800 pages about his life and left his wife out of them.

Hannah died of tuberculosis in February 1819, at 35, leaving four sons under 12. He never remarried, and the autobiography he composed decades later does not name her once. The other silence is bigger. Van Buren enslaved a man named Tom, whom he bought in the 1810s and who walked away around 1814. Ten years after that a man in Massachusetts wrote offering to seize him, and Van Buren answered that if it could be done without violence he would take 50 dollars for him. There is no record Tom was ever taken. As president, Van Buren's administration argued in federal court that the Africans who had seized the Amistad belonged to Spain. It lost.

He died on July 24, 1862 at Lindenwald, the Kinderhook estate he had bought while president, and was buried a short walk away in the village churchyard. He was 79 and had lived to watch the war his entire method had been built to postpone. What outlasted the method was a joke. His 1840 campaign clubs called themselves Old Kinderhook societies, and the initials fastened onto a jokey abbreviation a Boston newspaper had printed the year before — which is how the most widely spoken word on earth came to be tied to a president most Americans could not place. Lindenwald is now a National Historic Site.

Martin Van Buren's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Albany Regency company
  The New York machine he built and ran largely by mail 1820
• Lindenwald building
  The Kinderhook estate he bought while president and retired into 1839
• Independent Treasury Act law
  Structurally sound, four years late, and repealed within a year 1840
• The Free Soil ticket other
  He carried no state, took about a tenth of the national vote, and changed the outcome 1848
• The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren book
  Written abroad, published in 1920, and silent on Hannah from first page to last 1854
• Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States book
  Published five years after his death 1867

• 1796 aged ~14 Leaves school at 14 to sweep out a Kinderhook law office
• 1803 aged ~21 Admitted to the New York bar at 20
• February 21, 1807 aged 24 Marries Hannah Hoes, a cousin he had known since childhood
• February 5, 1819 aged 36 Hannah dies of tuberculosis at 35 He never remarried and never wrote her name again.
• 1829 aged ~47 Resigns the New York governorship after weeks to become secretary of state
• January 25, 1832 aged 49 The Senate refuses to confirm him as minister to Britain Calhoun broke the tie against him and made him a martyr instead.
• March 9, 1841 aged 58 The Supreme Court frees the Amistad captives his administration fought to return
• 1848 aged ~66 Runs for president on the Free Soil ticket and wins no state
• July 24, 1862 aged 79 Dies of asthma at Lindenwald, 15 months into the war

• John Quincy Adams 1767–1848
  Diplomat, sixth president, and later congressman who opposed slavery’s expansion and shaped early American foreign policy. opposed by
• John C. Calhoun 1782–1850
  Vice president and theorist of slavery and states’ rights whose doctrines intensified sectional conflict. rival
• Henry Clay 1777–1852
  Senator and statesman known as the Great Compromiser for his role in preserving the Union. rival
• Washington Irving 1783–1859
  Early American storyteller whose Sketch Book gave the country Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow. attached to his London legation
• Daniel Webster 1782–1852
  Senator and orator whose speeches on the Union and Constitution are among the greatest in history. opposed
• Horace Greeley 1811–1872
  Founding editor of the New-York Tribune whose editorials shaped antebellum and Reconstruction-era debate. attacked by