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Senate Years of Service: 1821-1828 Party: Democratic Republican; Crawford Republican; Jacksonian
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VAN BUREN, Martin, (half brother of James Isaac Van Alen),
a Senator from New York, a Vice President and 8th President of the
United States; born in Kinderhook, Columbia County, N.Y., December 5, 1782;
attended the village schools; studied law; admitted to the bar and commenced
practice in Kinderhook, N.Y., in 1803; moved to Hudson, N.Y., in 1809;
surrogate of Columbia County 1808-1813; member, State senate 1813-1820;
attorney general of New York 1816-1819; delegate to the State constitutional
convention in 1821; elected as a Democratic Republican (later Crawford
Republican and then Jacksonian) to the United States Senate; reelected in 1827,
and served from March 4, 1821, until December 20, 1828, when he resigned,
having been elected Governor; chairman, Committee on the Judiciary (Eighteenth
through Twentieth Congresses); Governor of New York from January to March 1829,
when he resigned to enter the Cabinet; appointed Secretary of State in the
Cabinet of President Andrew Jackson and served from March 1829, until his
resignation, effective May 1831, when he was commissioned Minister to Great
Britain; the Senate rejected his nomination in January 1832, and he returned to
the United States; elected, as a Democrat, Vice President of the United States
on the ticket with Andrew Jackson and served from March 4, 1833, to March 3,
1837; elected, as a Democrat, President of the United States and served from
March 4, 1837, to March 3, 1841; unsuccessful candidate for reelection as
President on the Democratic ticket in 1840 and on the Free-Soil ticket in 1848;
withdrew from political life and retired to his country home, Lindenwald, in
Kinderhook, N.Y., where he died July 24, 1862; interment in Kinderhook
Cemetery.
BibliographyAmerican National Biography;
Dictionary of American Biography; Cole, Donald.
Martin Van Buren and the American Political System. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984; Remini, Robert. Martin Van Buren and
the Making of the Democratic Party. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1959.
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