Colleen Shogan, former U.S. archivist and editor of the In Pursuit essay series, casts Martin Van Buren as a president caught at a painful turning point in American history. A political heir to Andrew Jackson, Van Buren assumed the presidency as the nation grappled with the fallout of Jacksonian reforms and a mounting sectional crisis over slavery.
Van Buren inherited more than the Oval Office. Jackson’s dismantling of the Second Bank of the United States and other political transformations left significant structural and financial instability. The Panic of 1837 — a severe economic collapse that began soon after Jackson left office — dominated Van Buren’s term and sharply limited his room for action. Economic distress and public anger over financial insecurity largely defined popular assessments of his presidency.
But the difficulties Van Buren faced were not merely fiscal. Sectional tensions over slavery deepened during his administration. Trained as a coalition-builder and party organizer, Van Buren aimed to tamp down sectional conflict and preserve the Union. Yet the politics of the 1830s and 1840s made compromise both harder and more morally fraught. Leaders of the era often sought to postpone or paper over slavery rather than confront it directly, a pattern that Shogan highlights in using Van Buren’s story to show how presidents can be overwhelmed by crises that exceed the authority of the office.
Van Buren also continued Indian removal policies begun under Jackson, extending the human and political consequences of those decisions. Meanwhile, slavery’s roots in the Constitution and early compromises — including the removal of stronger condemnations of the slave trade by founders seeking unity — meant the institution was deeply woven into the nation’s political and economic life. That foundation made ordinary legislative compromise increasingly ineffective.
Subsequent decades saw repeated attempts at legislative fixes — the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and appeals to ‘‘popular sovereignty’’ among them — yet none resolved the core moral and political conflict. Shogan argues that democratic bargaining can delay confrontation but sometimes deepens it, leaving successors to inherit intensified divisions that ultimately required more than political maneuvering to settle.
The In Pursuit essay invites a reassessment of presidencies often dismissed as weak. Van Buren appears as a leader trying to hold a fracturing coalition together and manage crises he had not created. His term illustrates how presidential authority can be constrained by prior decisions, structural economic forces and entrenched moral conflicts. For a fuller discussion, Shogan’s interview on The Takeout podcast explores the new In Pursuit essays, including the piece on Van Buren, and how studying these presidencies illuminates the political arc leading up to the Civil War.