Martin Van Buren

Born in Dutch-speaking Kinderhook, New York in 1782, Van Buren climbed from the state senate to Washington by mastering the gears of political organization: his Albany Regency machine controlled New York, and as Jackson's secretary of state he assembled the structure of the nascent Democratic Party. He resigned to smooth over the Petticoat affair, served briefly as ambassador to Britain, then returned as Jackson's vice president in 1833. With Jackson's backing he won the presidency in 1836, but the Panic of 1837 arrived almost immediately - his Independent Treasury plan, storing federal funds in vaults instead of banks, didn't pass until 1840, too late to stop the hemorrhaging. The Second Seminole War drained money, his refusal to annex Texas as a slave state alienated the South, and William Henry Harrison crushed him in 1840. He drifted left on slavery, ran as the Free Soil candidate in 1848, and ended where he started: back in Kinderhook, a War Democrat supporting Lincoln when he died of asthma in 1862.