Colleen Shogan, former archivist of the United States and now the editor of the In Pursuit essay series, highlights Martin Van Buren as a president who arrived at a pivotal — and painful — moment in American history. Van Buren, the political heir to Andrew Jackson, governed amid the unsettled aftermath of Jacksonian policy and the deepening national crisis over slavery.
Van Buren inherited more than the Oval Office. Jackson’s forceful dismantling of the Second Bank of the United States and his broader political transformations left structural and financial problems in their wake. The Panic of 1837 — a severe economic downturn that began shortly after Jackson left office — dominated Van Buren’s presidency and limited his ability to respond effectively. Economic collapse and financial insecurity defined much of public judgment about his term.
But Van Buren’s challenges were not only fiscal. The sectional tensions around slavery intensified during his administration. As a consummate coalition builder and party organizer, Van Buren sought to soften sectional divisions and preserve national unity. Yet the politics of the 1830s and 1840s made compromise harder and more morally fraught; the era’s leaders repeatedly tried to postpone or paper over the issue rather than confront it. Shogan and In Pursuit use Van Buren’s story to show how presidents can be overwhelmed by crises larger than their offices — and how repeated attempts to compromise over slavery ultimately failed.
Van Buren also carried forward parts of Jacksonian policy that had human consequences: the administration continued to implement Indian removal policies begun under Jackson, contributing further moral and political controversy. Meanwhile, debates about slavery — already lodged in the nation’s founding arrangements — kept resurfacing. Shogan notes that from the Declaration onward, framers like Jefferson had drafted condemnations of the slave trade but agreed to excise or soften language to secure unity among the states. Those early concessions embedded slavery in the political and economic life of the nation, making it progressively harder to resolve through ordinary political compromise.
In the decades after Van Buren, presidents repeatedly tried legislative fixes — the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and appeals to “popular sovereignty” among them — but none solved the underlying moral and political crisis. As Shogan suggests, the limits of democratic compromise become stark where core moral principles are involved: bargaining can postpone conflict but sometimes worsens it, leaving successors to carry the consequences. The divisions that haunted Van Buren’s presidency continued to escalate until they could no longer be contained short of a civil war.
The In Pursuit essay on Van Buren prompts a reconsideration of presidencies often labeled “weak” or “unsuccessful.” Van Buren emerges as a figure who tried to hold a fracturing political coalition together and to manage crises he had not created. His term illuminates how presidential authority can be constrained by past decisions, structural economic forces and entrenched moral conflicts. The project’s broader intent is to use individual presidential stories to explore how leaders contended with the nation’s deepest challenges — and how, in Van Buren’s case, the burdens of Jacksonism and the unresolved problem of slavery made his presidency, in effect, a trial by forces beyond his control.
You can hear Shogan’s full interview on The Takeout podcast, where she discusses the new In Pursuit essays — including the piece on Martin Van Buren — and how examining these presidencies helps explain the arc of American political development in the decades before the Civil War.
