Martin Van Buren
1782 - 1862
President of the United States
The man who was president when the Amistad incident erupted was a consummate political craftsman. Martin Van Buren had come to power by assembling the Democratic Party, an entity that in turn had laid the foundations of the American party system itself and thereby fundamentally restructured the way American politics worked. Van Buren was a man trying to make new, delicate mechanisms of national politics function over the 1830s -- a position that powerfully shaped his view of theAmistad revolt.
His father
was a tavern-keeper in upstate New York. The family was not especially wealthy or
well-connected, but as a young man Martin Van Buren attracted the attention of powerful
forces within New York politics. He proved to be a shrewd, charming and skillful
party builder, and by 1820 Van Buren's political followers, the "Bucktails,"
had gained control in the state legislature.
Political Parties. Van Buren had engineered this rise to power by rewiring New York's system of political parties. Specifically, he restructured parties as permanent, impersonal institutions, built around issues and imposing strict control over voting, patronage and policy-making. Americans up to this point had regarded political parties as suspicious and invidious--at best, necessary evils. But Van Buren defended parties as effective and essentially democratic ways to mobilize the political will of the electorate. Moreover, as he turned his sights to national office, he argued that parties would help to smooth over sectional differences between the slave-holding south and the free states of the north.
Van Buren's notion of political parties as organizing institutions proved instrumental in the consolidation of the Jacksonian Democrats in the late 1820s. Van Buren played a key role in Jackson's defeat of Adams in 1828, shoring up support for "Old Hickory" in New York. In return, Jackson made him Vice President.
Slavery. New York was still a slave state when Van Buren was growing up, and his family owned slaves. As a young man Van Buren owned a slave himself, a man named Tom. When Tom ran away, Van Buren made no effort to recover him. But ten years later, in 1824, the escapee was discovered living in Worcester, Massachusetts, and at that point Van Buren agreed to sell him to another man if he could be captured "without violence."
Subsequently Van Buren came around to oppose slavery in principle. But as a matter of public policy, he adhered closely to his sense of the compromises that the Constitution and Congress had set up to preserve both slavery and the union. And as a politician trying to build a national party, he found himself obliged to accommodate growing southern anxieties about northern abolitionism over the 1830s. He was a northerner, a Yankee, of course, and that was enough to make him suspect in southern eyes. So in 1835, preparing to run for president, he had to assure southern politicians and editors that he did not oppose slavery in those states where it already existed, that he opposed abolitionism, and specifically that he opposed the campaign to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia.
Presidential Politics. As president from 1836-1840, Van Buren continued this policy of protecting the Democratic Party's southern flank. He tried to steer a middle course, avoiding both the taint of abolitionism on the one hand and utter capitulation to radical southern pro-slavery demands on the other. He faced a stiff race for reelection in 1840. He therefore needed, or was convinced he needed, to find and make gestures demonstrating that he was prepared to protect the "peculiar institution" from its radical opponents. He appointed a disproportionate number of southerners to the Supreme Court, and his cabinet featured prominent southern representation. One of the most important of these southerners, from the perspective of the Amistad Africans, was John Forsyth of Georgia, Van Buren's Secretary of State.
TheAmistad Issue. Van Buren was not in Washington when theAmistad affair broke; he was campaigning in upstate New York. His cabinet therefore formulated the administration's initial response: meeting in mid-September, they took Forsyth's lead and arranged for federal authorities to support Spanish demands that the "slaves" be returned to Cuba to face trial as murderers and pirates. Van Buren soon returned to the capital, but he seems to have paid little attention to the matter, letting Forsyth continue to handle the situation. The president did not replace any judges in the case. But he did put federal attorneys on the case and he did sign off on an effort to have the Africans shipped immediately to Cuba if the court found for the administration, before any appeals could be filed. In sum, Van Buren wanted this problem to go away, cleanly and quietly. From his point of view, this was not only a potential diplomatic crisis with Spain, but more fundamentally a slave revolt -- a dangerous provocation to southerners already unsettled by the rise of northern abolitionism.
Fred Dalzell
Further Reading: John Niven, Martin Van Buren: The Romantic Age of American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) draws a sympathetic portrait of this complex man. Niven explains Van Buren's rather shoddy handling of theAmistad affair by depicting Van Buren as distracted by other issues and attributing the administration's tactics to Secretary of State John Forsyth.
