Question

explain how Van Buren was able to justify for parties? How did he convince Americans to accept political parties as not only legitimate but as essential to democracy?

Answer 1

The eighth president wanted the (small D) democratic party to remain permanent voice of the people.Mark R. Cheathem is a professor of history at Cumberland University.

“Permit me here to say of Mr. Van Buren that I have found him every thing that I could desire him to be, and believe him not only deserving my confidence, but the confidence of the nation.”

His belief that competing political parties were a necessary element of American politics has remained intact to this point and, for better or worse, his vision shapes our current political discourse. At the Papers of Martin Van Buren project, located at Cumberland University in Lebanon, our objective is to make the eighth president’s papers accessible so that we can understand the connection between Van Buren’s vision of partisanship and the way that it remains relevant even as it has evolved over nearly two centuries.

Van Buren, a native New Yorker, played a central role in American politics between the War of 1812 and the presidential election of 1848. He served a short term as New York’s governor and held several national positions, including U.S. senator, secretary of state, and vice president.

Van Buren ran for the presidency three times, winning in 1836 and losing in 1840 and 1848.

Tennesseans can thank him for electing two native sons to the presidency. Van Buren put together the national coalition that brought Andrew Jackson victory in 1828. Sixteen years later, Van Buren’s inability to win over enough Democratic delegates allowed James K. Polk to win the party’s nomination and, eventually, the election.

But Van Buren’s longest-lasting contribution has been the two-party political system. By the mid-1820s, there was only one national party, and it had disintegrated into factional fighting centered on the personalities of the leading candidates.

One of the documents that the Van Buren Papers project is making accessible is an 1827 letter written to Richmond, Virginia, newspaper editor Thomas Ritchie. In it, Van Buren laid out his plan to fix the nation’s political chaos. He wanted to formulate a national party that would bring together sections of the country based on “party principle,” not “personal preference.”

“We must always have party distinctions,” Van Buren wrote Ritchie, and “political combinations between the inhabitants of the different states are unavoidable.”

What we experience today was not Van Buren’s goal. He envisioned a two-party system, but not a rivalry of political equals.

The national party that he wanted to create was a democratic (small d) party that embodied true Americanism as determined by the majority of the people. Its opposition was a much smaller, but still powerful, aristocratic party comprised of wealthy elitists and special interests.

The goal, from Van Buren’s perspective, was to ensure that the democratic party remained the permanent voice of the people and that it drowned out the noise produced by the minority party, which was only interested in furthering its own selfish interests.

The United States of today is not the same nation in which Van Buren lived, however. His idea of majority rule ignored Americans who did not possess political rights, something that does not fit with our national identity in 2017.

Instead of a political system in which one party is clearly the voice of the people and one party is clearly beholden to special interests, today we have a system composed of two major parties, along with scattered third parties, that seem focused primarily on special interests instead of representing the good of all Americans.

If Van Buren were alive today, I think he would tell us all that we have forgotten political parties are, at their heart, made up of the people, and that it is the job of the people to bring the parties back into harmony with constitutional principles that benefit the good of the whole nation rather than special interests that divide us.

Mark R. Cheathem is a professor of history at Cumberland University and the project director for the Papers of Martin Van Buren, which can be found at VanBurenPapers.org.