Martin Van Buren and the American Political System (review)

76CIVIL WAR HISTORY by excellent maps and well-chosen illustrations. This book helps to demonstrate that James Lee McDonough is one of the nation's top Civil War writers. Joseph G. Dawson III Texas A&M University at Galveston Martin Van Buren and the American Political System. By Donald B. Coles. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Pp. xiii, 477. $45.00.) Martin Van Buren has enjoyed a good press in recent years. Numerous studies on party development underscore his important role; two books are devoted to a reassessment of his presidency; and the present volume follows by one year another full-length biography, the first in nearly half a century. In different ways all of these works move far beyond the old Whig image of a spoilsman and magician to an appreciation of his real if modest qualities of statesmanship. And not too modest at that, according to this new biography. The key to Van Buren's career was an ability to adapt to the accelerating forces of modernization while keeping in touch with the republican values of an earlier and presumably more stable age. A pragmatist and a politician , he was also a man of principle. Party organization in New York abetted his power struggle with DeWitt Clinton, but it also represented a creative response to the political realities of the new equalitarian age. As state legislator and governor, he accommodated the needs of banking , improvements, and constitutional reform, yet his older values set limits to change. Again, his skill at reconciling republican ideals and democratic capitalism enabled him to help forge the coalition of "planters and plain republicans" which elected Andrew Jackson. With few policy initiatives or new ideas of his own, he was essentially "a master of determining the direction in which events were moving and picking the best route." (81) More than any other adviser he helped to shape Jacksonian Democracy. This interpretation is generally convincing and yields other insights into Van Buren's personality and early career. As a young Republican rising in the "Federalist world" of the Hudson, he took on the qualities of "outward sociability" and "inner insecurity" (13) which made him especially sensitive to the hopes and fears of fellow Americans in an age of rapid change. The habit of deference to elders and social superiors was not sycophancy, as foes often charged, but rather a quality especially useful for the nation's second generation of leaders. Ideologically, he stood between Jefferson and Jackson—more democratic and entrepreneurial than the former, more republican and less nationalistic than the latter. Further insight might have come at this point by more analysis of these useful but elusive concepts, particularly the concept of "republicanism" for which a wealth of studies are available. BOOK REVIEWS77 About one-fourth of the volume is devoted to Van Buren's presidency. High marks are given for checking expansive tendencies and keeping peace with Mexico and Britain. On domestic matters the assessment is ambiguous and not always convincing. Contrary to the claims of the entrepreneurial school, Van Buren's basic response to the panic of 1837— the Independent Treasury—is rightly seen as another effort to reconcile republican values and new realities. But to say it was not Jacksonian is questionable (305), for Jackson considered an independent treasury as early as 1834 and hailed Van Buren's adoption of it. Others might also question the judgment that Van Buren made a mistake in persevering for three years until its passage. The alternative apparently would have been to address the "real needs" (315) of the country for expanded currency and banking, that is, to adopt the views of Whig foes and later New Dealers. Van Buren was not that much of a "politician," nor should his powers of adaptation be expected to stretch that far. His greatest state paper, the third annual message, can be read less as the views of a frustrated politician trapped by circumstances than as the outlook of a man genuinely committed to "republican" limits on enterprise. Bad times and good Whig strategy in 1840 explain his failure far better than the loss of his presumed magic. Relatively less space is devoted to the post-presidential years. Little new...