American History Hit - President Martin Van Buren

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

The 'Little Magician', the 'Sly Fox' or - to our expert guest - a 6.5/10 president. We're onto President number 8, Martin Van Buren.Don is joined by Edward Widmer - historian, writer, librarian, and musician who served as a speechwriter in the Clinton White House. One of Ted's many books is a biography of Martin Van Buren, published by Times Books in 2005.From success in the creation of a modern democratic party, to economic depression, war against Canada and more; in this episode you'll hear about the highs and lows of Van Buren's one term presidency.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Late 18th century Kinderhook, New York in Columbia County is a small village with a smattering of houses, a dry goods store, and of course a tavern. It is run by a man named Abraham Van Buren, born of Dutch parents, immigrants from Berlmanson in the Netherlands.

This evening, Abraham, who speaks Dutch with his wife and children, has rushed into town from his farm to tend to a gathering of customers, politicians en route from New York City to Albany, the newly named State Capitol. With these men, he speaks English. His son Martin, 14 years old, works the bar. For Martin, English might as well be his native tongue, learning to read and write it fluently at the village schoolhouse. And he will go on to develop formidable communication skills in his future career as a law clerk,

a state-national politician, and remarkably, for this tavern owner's son, as eighth president of the United States. All communities are apt to look to government for too much. Even in our own country, where its powers and duties are so strictly limited, we are prone to do so, especially at periods of sudden embarrassment and distress. But it's real duty.

That duty, the performance of which makes a good government, the most precious of human blessings, is to enact and enforce a system of general law. laws commensurate with, but not exceeding the objects of its establishment. And to leave every citizen and every interest to reap under its benign protection the rewards of virtue, industry, and prudence. This is American History Hit. I'm your host Don Wildman.

We're lucky you're listening. Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States, was, well, you'd be hard pressed to find an average American who could fill in the rest of that sentence. But in fact, Martin Van Buren from New York State's Hudson Valley, who lived from 1782 to 1862, died at 79 years of age, was a political titan of his time. But he now falls into the category of less than remembered presidents, where astonishing resumes and outsized accomplishments seemed to mean less than the fact that there was no resounding military victory, no great annexation, no economic boom. To the contrary, during the Van Buren administration, there was a screwy war with Canada, Texas was prevented from joining the Union, the national economy tailspinned, and the Cherokee nation was forced from their native lands.

Good times, four years of MVB. Truth is, Van Buren was a very talented man, who had the tough luck to follow Andrew Jackson's second term. Jackson, as we discussed in our previous presidential episode, lowered the boom on early 19th, century American politics at the federal level, and in doing so, set up his successor to fail. Van Buren, his vice president, and die-hard supporter. Imagine that. Well, that's the brief, but we can learn much from these less understood at presidency, so let's do it, in the company

of the esteemed Edward Ladd Widmer, Ted, if I may, historian, author, editor, speechwriter for the president in the Clinton White House, special assistant to President Bill Clinton, who has gone on to a scholarly career as a professor at Brown and director of the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. Ted Widmer, we've tapped the mother load. Welcome to American History Hit. MVB. Thank you, Don.

I love that we are talking. I'm not sure too many other Americans are talking about MVP, but we are. There you go. We're going to make this hip. I might prefer to do this episode about you, Ted. We're generational contemporaries, and you've been in the room for so much of what has teed up the

political era we're all living through. my word. Yeah, I'm lucky. I mean, I mostly have been an academic, but I got four years in the White House. It was incredibly exciting. They were complicated times to put it wildly the last four years of the 20th century, but I really enjoyed it. I got to see the sausage made, and that helped me as a historian, too. Those are story days for people your age at that time in the Clinton White House. I remember that. Everybody was very hands-on in those days. But instead, Martin Van Buren, One-term president, 1837 to 1841. And we're now 50 years since the U.S. Constitution was written, quarter century until the Civil War.

These are those years that so many Americans don't comprehend, but so much of what really makes 19th century federal politics in America is being laid down. And Van Buren is center stage for it all. Curious how you generally characterize his time in the White House. Well, you're not wrong to say it was a hard four years. It was not a successful presidency. There were big problems that were beyond his control, including a depression at the very beginning.

There was an argument that was really heating up over slavery. There'd been sort of a gentleman's agreement not to talk about it too much. That was unraveling, and he couldn't really stop it from unraveling. And then he lost a bid for re-election rather painfully because the other side had learned all of his tricks of running for office, all the kind of electioneering and stuff. slogans and songs and drinking games that his party had developed, the other party learned them even better. And so it was a very frustrating four years for him.

But I argued in the book that he still was really important in other ways. He basically created the modern Democratic Party and the two-party system came out of that. So he did do a lot to change politics in the 19th century. Yeah, let's talk about that first. many people do not realize that the political party was an invention, was a creation. I mean, it was happening elsewhere, of course, but Washington, of course, warns everyone, don't do it, don't get into this factional politicking. But someone like Martin Van Buren actually is drawn to it. He sees this as a good thing. Why is that? And how was he a prime architect of the Democratic Party?

He begins to figure it out in New York State. He's from a small town, still a small town, Kinder Hook, Hudson Valley. And as he's growing up, he's not wealthy. He's the son of a tavern keeper, just, you know, very modest family. And he basically grew up in a bar. And in New York state politics, like all states, really, at the beginning of our country's history, there were wealthy people, big land owners who controlled politics. And the owning of land was often a voting requirement. And as Van Buren made his way up through the New York system, he began to figure out that if he lowered the amount of land and money you needed to vote, he could get more people voting for him. So he succeeded well within New York and became a rising force as a New York

politician. And then as he got sent to Washington, he started to do the same thing and to reach out not only across regions, becoming friends with Southerners, but really building up a sense that the common man was the most important voter in America. And with Virginian friends first and then other friends, he created a new party behind Andrew Jackson in the late 1820s. That is really the modern Democratic Party. It's not Thomas Jefferson, we sometimes call, but what Jefferson had created was not what became the modern Democratic Party and what Van Buren did was. He was a very sharp lawyer, right? That was his background was in real estate law, which is tied to what you were saying about sort of a almost a land reform

view of things, I suppose. This begins under Jackson, as you say, the Democratic Party had been the Democratic Republicans. This is a good chance for us to understand how that division happens. Can you speak to that? Well, Jefferson does start something. And you use the word faction. And I think that's a good word. The founders warned against faction, as you said. But then they couldn't help themselves, they start to argue even in Washington's first term. And you get factions behind Jefferson on the one side and Hamilton with Washington's support on the other side. And Jefferson ultimately becomes president and then builds up a successful power network that really sort of destroys his rivals so much so that by the 1820s, there really is only one party. And they are

called Democratic Republicans and the federalists who had been their rivals are not really there anymore. And so when Van Buren comes in, he's really starting something new. And Jackson is a very different kind of a person. Like Van Buren, he's an outsider. He's from the West. He's from Tennessee, and he's quite contemptuous of wealthy power relationships and of Washington, D.C. So he's a very attractive figure to build a national party around. Even then, they were talking about draining the swamp. And there's a sort of anti-Washington energy behind Andrew Jackson. And as Jackson, he runs once and loses in a kind of a painful way in 1824. But then four years later, he wins overwhelmingly in 1828. And Van Buren is there to not only build up a national party, but a state party in each state,

behind Jackson. It's really not the same thing as what Jefferson had built a generation earlier. Interesting. Yeah, their basic values are, it's an agrarian-based, sort of decentralized government, states' rights, all that comes out of this, also pro-slavery, I must say in the South at least, which stems from this notion of states' rights. What I find unusual is the political alliance between a New Yorker and a Tennessean. I mean, is that as strange as it seems or not? In the better moments of the early Democratic Party, and you're right that it got worse, it sort of disintegrated and became more pro-slavery in the 1840s and 1850s. But at the beginning, there was a real populism behind it, and it included the urban north.

So there are a lot of poor people without land living in big cities like Philadelphia and New York, and they love Van Buren's politics. They feel shut out by the power networks of their own. cities and states. So as he's lowering voting requirements, making it easier to vote, they sign up. So it's really a North, South national party in which the common man is celebrated. So in the South, it's not big landholders who are the beneficiaries of slavery. It's more like the small farmers. That's the ideals, the poor farmers of the South and the poor city dwellers of the North. and that's the idealistic early Democratic Party.

But, you know, it always struggled to live up to those ideals. Sure. It's crazy how it resonates with even today's themes. You know, very, very similar stuff is being discussed. Absolutely. I mean, Donald Trump had a painting of Andrew Jackson in his Oval Office. Exactly. It made sense to me, although I think Jackson had a lot of virtues that Trump did not have,

but there are some connections there. Their opposition is the Whig Party, which will go on to become the Lincoln Republicans. Today, all this seems rather confusing and sort of pell-mell, but there was definitely a method to the madness. Politically, what was at stake as Van Buren assumes his presidency? Well, he's very happy to be the president. He's positioned himself perfectly by becoming by Jackson's vice president. He's his second vice president after a fight between Jackson and his first VP, John C. Calhoun. So Van Buren is well positioned to lead the party to ever greater heights, But he is fighting against a new opposition, the Whig Party, which you mentioned.

They're called that because in England the wigs are the people against the king and the people in power. And they were starting to describe Andrew Jackson as a king-like figure. So it made sense to call his opponents the wigs. And Lincoln is a wig. You're absolutely right. So he's trying to stay in power the way all politicians are and think about who will keep the party going after him. He was always good at encouraging young politicians to develop their own sources of strength. And he's just trying to keep a lid on a country that is very complicated and is getting

angrier. Not unlike what we've seen in our own recent history, people are forgetting the old forms of civility that make politics work when it does work. And they're really getting angry. They're fighting each other physically sometimes and certainly in angry arguments on the floor of Congress. And Van Buren's trying to keep a lid on that. And he really could not. And the biggest problem of them all was slavery. There are other problems too, but slavery is the one that is going to undo the compact of the union. And he can't stop it from being divisive. I have been making it rather a theme of these last presidential shows that this is the mercantile era of America. And until a few years ago, I really didn't think about it very much. But I think we

were discussing the Enlightenment and values changing in early 1800s months and months ago on a show. And it occurred to me that as Americans began to find upward mobility as a possibility in life, as they began making money, not a lot of it, but there was a chance of life changing according to, you know, with the American system. That begins a lot of sociological change and a lot of fighting begins because people start to realize that they have, you know, the chance of grabbing more in this society. And that's inevitably going to bring friction. I wonder how much of that is reflected in the Congress and in American politics in general. I think that's a good observation, Don, and people are making money in both sides in the north and the south and we should not forget the

West. And so their sense of their own prestige and power is growing, but they're bumping into each other. northern forms of wealth were often in conflict with southern forms of wealth. So you get these arrogant politicians from both sides who just don't want to be shut up in an argument. And so the argument is getting louder and more vitriolic. And Van Buren's whole career up to that point had been about sort of quietly bringing people together and specifically building a North-South alliance. And so this argument over slavery is devastating to him personally. It means his party is not going to survive and it didn't. Interesting.

He is a political animal out of the judicial world. A prosperous lawyer, as I say, represented real estate concerns in the Hudson Valley, serves in the New York State Senate, attorney general for the state. This is the time, as I say, of the Erie Canal and the rise of this kind of economy, which is really New York-based. I mean, people are watching what's happening in New York and realizing, oh, my goodness, this is how you do it. They're serving this new God, you know, this new money.

Van Buren's one of the power brokers of New York politics, and he's very good at it, which is very hard to be in that world. You've got Tammany Hall. Talk about the Albany Regency that he was a founder of that, or where did that fit? Yes. So the state power then, as now, was in Albany. And he goes first to Albany, which is near his hometown of Kinderhook and develops a kind of collaboration with other state leaders.

And one of the ways they found their way to power was there was a little. lot of simplifying of complicated real estate. In the earliest days of the New York colony, huge land grants were given to wealthy families. I mean, these were land grants bigger than some states. And Van Buren and like-minded friends start to chip away at those grants and argue that they're legally problematic and they're definitely not right for a country that is founded on freedom and individual rights and the rights of poor people to immigrate. into New York and then go find land for themselves. And so as they chip away at those huge estates, they begin to acquire supporters and political power. And so the Albany Regency is the term for

a series of governors and their allies in Albany working against these very wealthy people who were there from New York in the beginning. We did not mention a really interesting aspect of his childhood, which is that he is the only, he is the only U.S. president who's natural-born language was Dutch. He was the only one who spoke a foreign language as a child. And that speaks to the whole Hudson Valley culture that you're talking about, these gigantic Dutch grants that were given, you know, in the 1600s, the 70s. Yeah, that's one of the most interesting things I discovered in my short book about Van Buren. And I've been happy to see it repeated a lot out there that it's often mentioned now that not all presidents grew up with English as their first language.

So he was not a recent immigrant, to put it mildly. His family had been there a long time. But because he spoke Dutch first and English second, he's a kind of role model for later immigrants. Yes, exactly. Under Monroe and John Quincy Adams' presidencies, Van Buren is a U.S. Senator, then briefly becomes governor of New York, very briefly, only for about three months when Andrew Jackson picks him for his White House cabinet, Secretary of State, always a notable choice because Secretary of State generally is being groomed for presidency back then. This is when he really

kind of starts to see the trajectory ahead. He serves faithfully in that role, but then finally becomes, as you say, the vice president in the Jackson administration. He is elected in 1837, having really ridden that ride that so many before, you know, Monroe and all the rest had done this very traditional thing, which was now the path to the presidency. What is it about Jackson? that so appealed to Martin Van Buren, would you say? Is it the common man politics primarily? Yeah, I mean, I think part of it was opportunistic. I think Van Buren just understood Jackson was a great candidate,

a great person to build a national party around. And Jackson had charisma, tons of charisma. He was a military hero. He had an effective way of speaking. He was not an intellectual, but he just got people behind him. And he had also attracted. policies. His attack on the banks in the eastern cities fit a moment when people wanted that to happen. They were getting nervous about how rich people were becoming in cities like Philadelphia and New York.

So as Jackson attacks the banks, there's a feeling a lot like what FDR had a hundred years later when he goes after East Coast fortunes and promotes the New Deal and benefits for ordinary Americans. There was a lot of that feeling under Andrew Jackson. But I do think they got along. They liked each other personally. They were very different, but they both pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and no one really helped them. And I think that was a powerful bond.

And then also they were both widowers. And it sounds sort of funny, but wives were a big source of friction in the Washington, D.C. of the 1820s and 30s. There were lots of factions of political wives who looked pretty harshly down their noses at newcomers, including Van Buren and Andrew Jackson. So that only deepened their friendship. And John C. Calhoun might well have become president if his wife had not led this sort of weird social friction where they were looking down on Andrew Jackson and some of his friends not long after they arrived there.

It's such a cool thing to imagine because back then it was such a season. town. You know, you didn't have a big population. So the population was merely these politicians coming in for the congressional season. And even the president left. And it was just a kind of one-horse town all the other times. And then suddenly there's this schedule of parties that must be what happens, basically. And these women that were running these parties were so powerful. He enters office in the midst of what's called the panic of 1837. One of a series of panics. Reminds me a bit. There's so many modern references here. It reminds me of Obama in the Great Recession of 2008. This would be a similar scenario, a cause for different reasons. Can you explain this particular one?

Well, there's one difference, which is it hit right after Van Buren won. So it was devastating to him, whereas Obama benefited from it. It was already hitting, which helped Obama to win, I think. But yeah, it was a collapse of confidence in the economy. And often these panics are psychological, as much as anything else. And the American economy was overheated. And I just praised Andrew Jackson for his attack on Eastern Banks, but he probably caused a lot of trouble also because he removed a source of stability in the system. And there were a number of ways in which the White House, which, you know, there wasn't really a clear sense of how to control the economy. And Andrew Jackson, by attacking banks and even specific, there was something called the Species Circular, which was a

White House directive restricting the flow of money between banks. That did not help the banks recover from the early shocks of the panic. So basically, the panic was coming in some way, but Andrew Jackson's blunt attack on East Coast financiers made it harder for them to recover to the panic as it was coming. And so really it was just four years of depression and no one knew how to get out of it. They finally did, but it was really hard. But what would have sparked such a panic? I don't think I understand that. My sense of it was the way they always start. A few bad investments start to go south and investors lose their confidence and try to pull their money out. And then there's a psychological crisis where half the country is trying to pull money out of

investments. The other half is trying to protect investments and real estate values go down, stocks to the extent they've existed, slow down. And so there's no money in the system. This is what was changed in the early 20th century to try to create some sort of buffer because it's always the bank runs that cause this thing. That's a bit of a leading question because it was always the same thing. People will lose confidence. They run to the bank, get their money out, and then the banks can't do anything at that point. And it just sort of snowballs. It wasn't until the Fed and all the rest of it was created in the early 20th century that there's a safety valve system in there that stops this from happening, which is why we don't panic so much nowadays. But people seem to forget what a benefit has been created by this system.

I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Finally, it resolves, but not until very later on, Van Buren's outlook on banking, he wanted an independent treasury system, right? And this was his preference. Right. That was an idea that under Jackson and Van Buren, and supported by the National Democratic Party, would give some financial authority to people in the major cities where so much money was flowing around, but keep it out of the hands of the private banks, which were understood to be personal fiefdoms of wealthy East Coast families. So something a little more like what you just said, the Fed and then the banking reforms of the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt. It was trying to put banking under federal authority. So that's the backdrop for so much of it, which is often the case with these kinds of presidencies where we don't talk about them much.

It's usually because the economic woes that accompanied them took the wind out of that sale. Another aspect of Jacksonian democracy was, to say the very least, no democracy for Native American tribes. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was signed by Andrew Jackson. It forced the relocation of Native tribes west of the Mississippi. River. This starts under Jackson, but is really Martin Van Buren that carries it forth, eventually moving more than 60,000 native peoples, 18 tribes west. This is the famous Trail of

Tears involving the Cherokee Nation. Did Ben Buren see this coming? Was he in favor of this? Where did he fall on this issue? I looked pretty hard to find evidence of Van Buren being sympathetic to what we might call liberal causes today. And it was hard to find. find him being that way in terms of modern identity politics. So you're absolutely right. He approves Cherokee removal. I think it's more identified with Jackson than Van Buren, but Van Buren carries it out. I mean, Van Buren was still a partner of Andrew Jackson, even after Jackson left Washington and Van Buren became president. They were understood to be part of a team. And so he wasn't going to overturn Jacksonian policies if he could avoid it.

He's a little better on the slavery issue. He's not great during his presidency. But later in his political life, he got actually surprisingly strong on the slavery question, just not when he was president. So, you know, these are complicated things. And Jackson is really quite unpopular now around teachers of American history. And the fact that Trump liked him so much didn't help in the academic world. But I've often found it's more complicated that Jackson really didn't like John C. Calhoun, who was the chief defender of slavery.

And Jackson went after some of the more egregious slave owners in his own way. But he was a slave owner himself. And as you say, he was all about freeing up land for poor white farmers to move west and have small farms of their own. And that meant, unfortunately, a lot of really terrible decisions relating to Native Americans. Yeah. A very, very big part of what transpires throughout the 19th century really finds its roots, or at least sets its roots in Martin Van Buren's time, unfortunately. It's just ironic because I just want to underscore the fact that this man was a very pretty enlightened guy in his own personal life and certainly shows that later post-presidency. but it's his link and his political capital he gets from Andrew Jackson that kind of defines what he is like in his time in the White House.

Well, we've seen this over and over again. I mean, Lyndon Johnson carried out the Vietnam War arguing to himself and to anyone who would listen that he was following the policies of John F. Kennedy, who was so popular throughout the 1960s. I don't think Kennedy would have ever elevated the conflict to the level Johnson did. But successor presidents often drive themselves crazy trying to follow the policies of the popular predecessor. And I think you're right. Van Buren did some of that. The reason I asked you so many questions early in this conversation about political parties is it becomes really the defining element of the next few decades in terms of the Democrats versus eventually the Republicans.

And it's the grasping on of these issues that create the power base for them. Not unlike today, but it's a lot less defined these days. It's a lot more general. You have really specific issues happening with the beginnings of new states out west, the spread or not spread of slavery. And the Democrats are very strategic about grabbing on to these issues and seeing how it's going to play out for their benefit down the road. Martin Van Buren had everything to do with putting that stuff in place. I mean, Texas is happening for its own reasons. I don't think he caused the problem of Texas and whether to accept it as a state, but he inherited the problem and he starts to deal with it in a way.

Actually, it's a place to admire Van Buren when sometimes that's not easy to do, but he resists the idea of Texas coming in because many people in the North are afraid that it's going to be possibly going to be five new slave states. Texas is so big. It could be divided into a lot of states. It did come in as one state finally, but it could have been a lot. And that would have been a lot of votes in the Senate defending slavery. And Van Buren was very queasy about that possibility. But they could see, I imagine, a guy like Van Buren and numerous other of these Democrats could see within their own lifetimes how many more states would be approved. You know, it was happening on a pretty tight schedule here.

And as a result, they can kind of play that chess game out as politicians. And you see a direct line between Van Buren and Stephen Douglas, you know, who's eventually debating these issues with Abraham Lincoln. That's decades of development there and set in, you know, it in concrete. And that's how hard it is eventually for the Republicans under, say, Lincoln, to dismantle this political apparatus that had been built so strongly between Van Buren and, you know, all the rest of them that go on all those years. It's really an impressive aspect of American history that people don't really pay attention to. During his presidency, I want to point out one thing that's really interesting that happens. Amistead. La Amistead is the slave ship that comes to shore very famously. Steven Spielberg makes a big movie about it. But long before that, John Quincy Adams argues this thing right to the Supreme Court. All of this is happening as a backdrop to Van Buren, isn't it? Yeah, it happens during his presidency.

So, I mean, throughout his four years, you start to like your subject. So I was always looking to find things to defend Van Buren. And I did find many. I mean, we talk about how he rose up as a common man against great obstacles. That's impressive. His personal life was seemingly not tainted by any scandals. But in this case, he was on the wrong side of history. And you really don't want to be on the wrong side of Stephen Spielberg.

and he is. So during his presidency, a Spanish ship carrying slaves to the West Indies, there's a mutiny, and the slaves take over, which we like. We like that.

And then they sail, they don't really know where they're going. It's an incredible act of courage. And they finally go a ground on either Long Island or Connecticut. And so it's an international legal problem.

Who owns this ship? Are the slaves? free, having freed themselves, or are they still slaves belonging to their owners? And it's a giant political hot potato landing on the United States when it's just not at all at ease talking about these issues. And Van Buren orders that the Navy take the ship and return it to its owners. So it's not an attractive position. John Quincy Adams, who's a former president, and this is wonderful. John Quincy Adams, the president who was defeated by the Jackson Van Buren Coalition in 1828, he sees this not only as a political problem, but as a great moral problem. And good for him for seeing it

that way. And he argues up to the Supreme Court that these are human beings who liberated themselves and that slavery is an immoral and should be illegal. And he wins his case and that's the story of the movie and Van Buren loses in a sense because his government loses the trial. But later in his life, I don't want to forget to say this, he comes around and he becomes a critic of slavery in a very meaningful way. He knows that abolition is such a hot potato, as you say, such an explosive issue. This is what's interesting to me. These Democrats are so many of them, not necessarily pro-slavery, but they see the problem of the nation splitting over the issue. And they end up on the wrong side of history because they're too worried about holding this thing together versus

confronting the morality of the issue. And that really does inform the whole path from 1840 onward, really. It's an amazing theme that goes on right to the Civil War. There's a lot left untouched here, not least of which is his more successful foreign relations. I mean, he keeps us out of a border war. Let's talk about that. This is the only time we went to war with Canada, as I understand, right? Yeah, it wasn't a full-blown war skirmishes, but there were a lot of tensions over borders. Maine, especially. Maine is huge. It was huge then, and it's still huge, and it wasn't entirely well understood where the northern border of Maine was.

Canada is also huge. And so there were unresolved border tensions going back to the American Revolution that Van Buren and his state department worked pretty well to resolve. So, right, he's doing a lot of things very competently, even as he's not able to keep a lid on the slavery argument that's tearing the country apart. But he performs adequately and even better than adequately in a lot of categories of presidential leadership. Same with Mexico. I mean, we could have gotten into a really sticky situation earlier than we did eventually. We do have a war later on.

But this was one of those situations where he backs off of Texas, which wants to annex itself to the, the U.S., but that's going to cause a war with Mexico. He sort of sidesteps that whole thing, right? Yeah. I mean, everyone who's from Texas is so patriotic about their state's history, and that's all good. And we're all proud of this huge, complicated, beautiful state, but it actually belonged to another country. It did not belong to the United States. It belonged to Mexico. Anglo-American settlers go into Texas and then start to take over these northern parts of Mexico that are now Texas. And first they call it a country, a republic, the Texan Republic, but they want to come into the United States. And Van Buren, is former Secretary of State, and he

knows law, international law very well, he knows it's stealing land from another country. We basically stole Texas a couple times from Mexico. And first, as it becomes a republic, and then it comes into the United States, and that leads to the Mexican War, where we Ted, where do you stand on Martin Van Buren? Having written an entire book on him, where do you come down on Van Buren one to ten? Maybe 6.5. Oh, that's pretty good. I think seven would be too good. So, you know, maybe six is about right. But four or five, I feel like it's too negative. I grew fond of the man, including his very long life as an ex-president when he did a lot of good things. He supports Abraham Lincoln, which was hard for him. But he did. And he becomes much more critical

of slavery in the 1840s and 18. He runs as an anti-slavery candidate in 1848, which was kind of incredible. He's the ultimate party guy. And he runs against his own party because he feels it's been taken over by the pro-slavery people. And I think that was quite courageous. And he's just interesting to the end. He's this sort of short, pudgy guy. He doesn't look like a president, but he made it to the presidency. And then for decades after, he gave good advice to up-and-coming politicians. And as the Democratic Party got worse and got more pro-slavery, he tried to offer a meaningful critique and to say, that's not what we're about. We were about poor people in the cities and a balance between North and South, not just giving the South everything it wants,

but keeping a lid on these divisive questions and the Union, the same thing Lincoln believes and he believes in the Union. So I think a lot of his values were in the right place, even if his own presidency was more noticeable for failure than success. If you look at the whole life, he comes out a little better. He actually dies one year into the Civil War, right? He sees that union he dearly loves fall apart. I think it's very interesting, too, that he's such a loyalist, that he finds himself, it finds it hard to emerge from the shadow of the man he was so loyal to.

And that seems to be a repeated pattern. We're seeing it right now among these guys who are vice president. or cabinet members who get all too deep in with these guys and then can't get out to be themselves. Ted Widmer is an author and historian. You must check out. His books, Young America, The Flowering of Democracy in New York City, Lincoln on the verge, disunion, a history of the civil war, all these and more. Martin Van Buren, for one. Ted, what's new on your horizons that people should know about? Well, believe it or not, I'm writing a book. Has nothing to do with American history. I got really interested in the early Beatles. I'm a big Beatles fan, and I found some papers that belong to a young

man named Stuart Sutcliffe, who was the first bassist in the Beatles, and named the Beatles. And I think he was a little more important than history has given him credit. So it's a very long leap from Martin Van Buren to Stuart Sutcliffe, but that's my next project. Thank you so much, Ted Widmer. Nice to meet you and really appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed this episode of American History Hit. Please remember to like, review, and subscribe. Follow us. you get your podcasts, and I'll see you next time.