Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics [Hardcover]

Joel H. Silbey (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0742522431 | ISBN-13: 978-0742522435 | Publication Date: August 2002

Martin Van Buren was a one-term president whose public life has long been overshadowed by the more fiery personalities of his day--Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun. Nevertheless, Van Buren was a transforming political figure in American history, one of the first of the new republic's professional politicians. In the early part of the 19th century, America was skeptical of popular politics, distrustful of political parties, and disdainful of political management. However, as prominent historian Joel H. Silbey demonstrates, Martin Van Buren took the lead among his contemporaries in remolding the old political order as he captured the New York state governorship, a seat in the United States Senate, and ultimately the Presidency. Silbey argues that Van Buren recognized the need for effective national political organization and, in the process, helped remake America's political culture. Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics, takes a fresh look at the life and political career of one of America's most often overlooked, yet most influential, public figures.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics, Joel Silbey draws on his deep knowledge of the Jacksonian era to produce an excellent study of one of the most important political leaders of the early nineteenth century. Silbey's deft analysis of Van Buren's public career, spanning some four decades, highlights his many contributions to the formation of the Democratic party and the development of the second party system. Clearly written, this concise biography offers a sure-handed introduction to the emergence of the American democratic system in the years after 1815. (William E. Gienapp Harvard University )

Martin Van Buren was hated, ridiculed, and wrapped in mystery during his lifetime, but in later years, he was too often forgotten or misunderstood. Joel H. Silbey has put the 'Little Magician' in proper perspective at last, in this concise, thoughtful analysis of one of America's most pivotal politicians. (Harry Watson )

In this welcome book, one of our best political historians has given us the best biography of one of our best politicians. Joel Silbey's Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics will be required reading for all interested in the Jacksonian era. (William Freehling )

A satisfying biography of one of our least-known presidents, covering his entire life from start to finish. Silbey offers many fresh and welcome perspectives. . . . [The biography] succeeds as both a concise biography for the casual reader, and a critical re-examination for the seasoned historian. Recommended. (Fauquier Times Democrat )

Since the 1960s, Joel H. Silbey has been one of the leading political historians in the United States. With Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics, he has produced what is perhaps the best brief introduction to the democratization of the American political process. In his enjoyable biography of the most important early American politician, Martin Van Buren, Silbey provides countless readers with the ideal book about the early republic for students in either survey courses or those upper level courses that deal with the Early Republic. (William Shade )

A satisfying biography of one of our least-known presidents, covering his entire life from start to finish. Silbey offers many fresh and welcome perspectives. . . . [The biography] succeeds as both a concise biography for the casual reader, and a criticalre-examination for the seasoned historian. Recommended.... (Fauquier Times Democrat )

Joel Silbey has produced a fine work on the eighth U.S. president worthy of examination by scholars of the American presidency and political scientists engaged in the study of America's two-party system. (The North Carolina Historical Review )

This is an excellent short biography. (The Journal Of Southern History )

This book makes an undeniably important contribution. (Civil War History )

Silbey has provided a well-written and concise analysis of [Martin Van Buren's] career. (The Historian )

About the Author

Joel H. Silbey is President White Professor of History at Cornell University. Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of Popular Politics is his 13th book.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (August 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0742522431
• ISBN-13: 978-0742522435
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,450,868 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tragic Genius and the American Tragedy, December 31, 2003

By 

David H Miller "rothbardianphysicist" (Sacramento, California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics (Hardcover)

Martin van Buren invented the American Democratic Party.

More broadly, he was responsible as much as any other single man for the overall political party structure which exists in the United States to this day.

Yet, to most of his latter-day countrymen, he is merely one of those forgettable nobodies who inhabited the White House between Andy Jackson and Honest Abe.

Joel Silbey's readable and engaging book tries to correct that historical neglect.

Silbey ably tells the story of van Buren's rise from modest beginnings to dominance of the New York political scene, van Buren's movement to the national stage and his restructuring of the national political party system, his ascendance to the Presidency, and his ultimate failure to attain his long-term political goals.

As fascinating as is the story of van Buren's successes, it is his failures which hold the greatest lessons for posterity.

As a young, loyal Jeffersonain, van Buren early in his career supported "Mr. Madison's War" (the War of 1812). But the increase in federal power and enhancement of federal legitimacy which came from that war led the country in the direction of expanded federal activity and authority relative to the states.

This offended van Buren's laissez-faire/states-rights Jeffersonian sensibilities. To combat what he denounced as resurgent Federalism, van Buren created a new political structure around a new political party based on states rights, limited government, and laissez-faire economic policy.

That party was the Jacksonian Democratic Party and, until the end of the nineteenth century, the Democratic Party largely adhered to the principles which van Buren imprinted upon it at its birth.

(It may seem strange to hear that the Democratic Party was, through most of its history, the limited-government/states-rights party in the United States. Yet, as late as 1928, Frank Kent, in his lengthy "The Democratic Party: A History" defined states rights as the central unifying principle of the Democratic Party. It was only in the depression of the 1930s that party positions were reversed and the Democrats abandoned the founding principles upon which van Buren had built the party.)

Although the Democrats did generally adhere to van Burenite principles through the nineteenth century, in the course of the nineteenth century the Democratic Party slowly lost its ability to control the nation's destiny. By the middle of the twentieth century, the party had abandoned all of its founding principles: van Buren would have been appalled by the militarism, welfare-statism, corporate favoritism, and outright imperialism which now characterize the Republic he so loved.

What went wrong?

Van Buren himself was brought low by two intractable problems of nineteenth-century America: imperial expansion and slavery. As Silbey narrates in detail, van Buren lost the Democratic nomination in 1844 due to his refusal to countenance imperial expansion (the annexation of Texas, which led, ultimately, to the U.S. seizure of half of Mexico). Van Buren vacillated wildly in his attitudes toward the slave states: as President he was an outspoken enemy of the abolitionists and ally of the slave power, but in 1848 he became the Presidential candidate of the anti-slavery Free Soil Party.

In his final years, van Buren endorsed Abraham Lincoln's military crusade against the slave states, a crusade that decisively destroyed the states-rights position which had been the guiding star of van Buren's political life.

But perhaps the ultimate problem, which van Buren failed to perceive, was the inner logic of the Constitutional structure established in 1787. The Constitution, unlike the preceding Articles of Confederation, created a strong federal Executive and granted the power of taxation to the central government: the Constitutional system was, in its intrinsic logic, despite the Founders' intentions, not a confederation of sovereign states but a centralized, national government.

Of course, neither the actual text of the Constitution nor the intentions of its authors mandated the huge, interventionist, imperialist federal government which we possess today. But to believe, as the Framers and van Buren did believe, that the Constitutional government could be prevented from turning into an all-encompassing leviathan was politically naive.

So great was van Buren's political genius (he was known in his time as the "Little Magician") that he almost succeeded in his grand historical aims. For over three decades, until the catastrophe of the War Between the States, the poltical structures created by van Buren succeeded in defying the logic of history and keeping America as a decentralized federation rather than a centralized nation-state.

But van Buren's grand design for a strictly limited federal government was ultimately wrecked by the War Between the States and by the economic and geopolitical disasters of the twentieth century.

In our own day, both American citizens and all the nations of the world must confront the results of van Buren's historically tragic failure. Can the federal government of the United States of America somehow be restrained in either its domestic powers or its international adventurism? Silbey's brief but fascinating book is a cautionary warning to all who now grapple with this central problem facing the human race.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Broad Brush Analysis of Van Buren, February 16, 2005

By 

Steve Fast (Hillsboro, KS, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics (Hardcover)

This book focuses on Van Buren's role in the development of modern political parties in America, but Silbey also ably narrates the life of Van Buren. This is a broad brush biography--Silbey does paint the whole canvas, and he paints it well, but you won't find the exquisite (and sometimes excruciating) detail that most biographers give.

Silbey is very good at relating Van Buren's life to the times he lived in. By far the strong point of the book is the cogent analysis of Van Buren's life, why he took certain actions, and fitting it all into his life purpose of party formation.

One question I had about the biography was whether Van Buren really did do nothing as president (which would have fit his political philosophy) or whether Silbey just narrated the events that had to do with party formation during his administration and that there just weren't many of them. I suspect the former.

The book is well-written, although there aren't many of those memorable turns of phrases; but it certainly won't put you to sleep either. A bit pricey, especially for the length. Overall, a good book.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Poorly written., October 14, 2007

By 

James Yanni (Bellefontaine Neighbors, Mo. USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics (Hardcover)

To be fair, if all you care to rate a history book by is the extent to which it is well-researched and informative, I suppose I would have to grant this book four stars; my only real complaints on that score are, first, that it pays too little attention to the private life of Van Buren; his marriage is hardly mentioned at all, and his relationships with his sons are almost always relegated to his professional relationships with them as grown men; and, second, the fact that it's a touch more complimentary than I feel he deserves. But the latter problem is simply a matter of opinion, and the author is entitled to have a better opinion of the founder of the political machine than I do, and the former is simply a matter of my preference; I prefer full-life biographies to professional biographies.

But as someone who identifies with the Roman guard in "Monty Python's Life Of Brian", (the one who forces Brian to correct the grammar of his anti-Roman graffiti), more than I do with Brian himself, I am appalled that someone who is as poor a writer as this author can get a scholarly book published. Reading portions of this book, I am reminded of the "Peanuts" cartoon in which Charlie Brown is writing his pen pal and writes, "Today, we, learned, how, to use, commas." Granted, Silbey is never THAT bad, but he's bad enough. If it were just the frequent insertion of unnecessary commas that I would prefer to see excised, it wouldn't be so bad; I'd notice it, wince, and mostly ignore it. But he goes beyond that to frequent use of commas where they are simply WRONG ("Nevertheless, Van Buren supported his fellow New Yorker as a mark of his solidarity with his state's Republicans and, undoubtedly, because, to do otherwise, would seriously affect his standing (and future prospects) among New York's Republican leaders."; "But Clinton's promarket, economic expansionary, ideas clashed with Van Buren's quite different vision of Republicanism, which stressed commitment to those who were less commercially minded: small landholders, village artisans, and urban workers, who did not need, nor benefit from, the expansionary goverment projects that an aggressive market orientation demanded.": These two quotes come from a single page, and there are many more like them throughout the book, as well as far too many other typos and sloppy mistakes in language and punctuation for me to consider the book professional) and this isn't simply a matter of stylistic differences between me and the author; this is a matter of the author being a poor enough writer that he has no business earning money by writing. If his grasp of his subject matter and his ability to convey it were not as solid as they are, I'd have felt no qualms about rating this as a one-star effort on the basis of the writing. Competence in his field earned him a second star; I won't grant higher than that to something that was frequently painful to read.