Martin Van Buren: A Life From Beginning to End (Biographies of US Presidents).
Though incredibly detailed and exceptionally well-researched, this biography falls flat in two areas.!
Martin Van Buren: America’s First Politician
The subtitle of Martin Van Buren: America’s First Politician, a deeply researched and well-written biography of our eighth president, might sound grandiose.
But then, how else to promote a book about a middling, largely forgotten antebellum figure whose grave in tiny Kinderhook, New York, may be the least visited of all the presidential resting places?
Van Buren, whom author James M.
Bradley and other historians credit with establishing the political-party system in America, is also distinguished by being the first commander-in-chief born in the new country (in 1782) and the only one whose first language was not English.
Dutch was the lingua franca in the Van Buren household in the upper Hudson Valley village. He was not the only president of Dutch descent, however, and he was far from the most distinguished. That honor would go to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, of patrician patroon lineage, elected a century later.
If FDR faced st