Comrade | Guevara
Friends familiar with history know that the Daoguang Emperor, as a conservative and mediocre emperor, played a key role in the process of the Qing Dynasty's transformation from prosperity to decline, so the evaluation of him by later generations was quite negative. Coincidentally, in the same year that the Daoguang Emperor was born, the United States thousands of miles away also gave birth to a future mediocre lord, and the evaluation in history was also not high. This person is martin van buren, the first Dutch president of the United States.
Portrait of Van Buren
Van Buren was born in 1782 to a Dutch immigrant family in The Village of Kindhuke, New York, the same year as the Daoguang Emperor of the Qing Dynasty. Although Van Buren's father was a small planter and a small hotel owner, and owned 6 slaves, due to poor management, the family was not well-off, and often had to rely on debt to survive. Because of the compulsion of life, the young Van Buren often helped his father carry goods or miscellaneous goods after school, and because of his short size, he was jokingly called "Little Pu Bao".
In order to change the fate of the qing, Van Buren began to study law at the age of 14, and with his outstanding talent and diligence, he finally became a practicing lawyer at the age of 20. Because of his profound knowledge, eloquence, and proficiency in business, Van Buren's career as a lawyer was quite successful, and he accumulated considerable fame and contacts, and thus entered politics. In 1808, Van Buren served as a probate judge in Columbia County, and four years later he was elected to the Senate of New York As a Democrat.
Van Buren nicknamed "The Little Magician"
Since his election as a senator in New York, Van Buren has been "hanging" all the way in the political arena, and in the following ten years, he has successively served as the general prosecutor of New York State, a senator of Congress, and the governor of New York. During this time, Van Buren and a group of local politicians controlled the political machine of New York, and repeatedly tried to manipulate local electoral politics, earning nicknames such as "Little Magician" and "Kindhuke Red Fox". In November 1828, Jackson, the number one hero of the Second Anglo-American War, was elected president, and Van Buren played an important supporting role in this.
In order to reward Van Buren, Jackson promoted him to secretary of state from the beginning of his presidency, making him the third most powerful person in the United States. Although he has only been at the helm of the State Department for two years, Van Buren has made a series of outstanding achievements in foreign and domestic affairs, helping Jackson solve many problems and crises, so he is deeply trusted by the latter. Van Buren's growing favor aroused the envy of Vice President Calhoun, who, intent on seeking the presidency, used his power in Congress to frequently harass Van Buren, eventually forcing the latter to resign.
Jackson
Although Van Buren temporarily lost power, there were many sympathizers, and the growing discord between Calhoun and Jackson led to his eventual absence from the throne. By the time Jackson was sworn in again in 1833, vice president had been replaced by Calhoun by Van Buren. As the president's "spare tire", Van Buren fully supported Jackson's various governance measures and continued to play a role in "fighting the fire" for the president on some key issues, which strengthened Jackson's idea of letting him succeed.
In 1836, Jackson followed the tradition pioneered by Washington and announced that he would not seek a third term, but instead solemnly recommended Van Buren to run for office. With Jackson's support, Van Buren successfully won the Democratic nomination, defeated rivals such as Whig candidate Harrison Sr. in the general election at the end of the year, and became the first Dutch president of the United States and the eighth president of the United States, and was officially sworn in on March 4 of the following year.
Second Bank of the United States
During Jackson's administration, in order to protect the interests of the working class, he vigorously attacked the power of the banking consortium, for which he withdrew funds from the central bank, the Second Bank of the United States, and devolved the loan business to the state banks and regional banks. Although this kind of measure is conducive to breaking the monopoly of the industrial and commercial giants on the economy and stimulating the development of the private free economy, at the same time, large-scale financial fraud has emerged. As the situation got worse, by the time Van Buren became president, an economic crisis that swept the country erupted.
The severe depression caused by the economic crisis has caused embarrassment to the people's lives and turbulent social order. In response to the crisis, Van Buren first took the banking industry to "open the knife", announcing that it would ban the establishment of new banks and prohibit the investment of government funds into state banks in order to actively maintain the solvency of the government. At the same time, Van Buren also proposed the establishment of an independent treasury system, with an independent treasury in charge of government funds, to ensure fiscal independence, prevent interest groups from profiting from the banking industry, and demanded the issuance of $10 million treasury bills.
Old Harrison
To be sure, the measures introduced by Van Buren are quite realistic, but because Congress is too slow to pass, the crisis continues to spread and eventually become unstoppable. In this regard, the Whig Party took the opportunity to attack the government's corruption and incompetence and disregard for the lower classes, which greatly damaged Van Buren's prestige and caused a major split within the Democratic Party, thus laying the groundwork for his failure to run for re-election. In November 1840, Van Buren lost the general election to his old rival Harrison the Elder and stepped down on March 4 of the following year.
After leaving office, Van Buren was not willing to withdraw from the stage of history, and then ran for president twice in 1844 and 1848, but in the end he ended in a fiasco. Frustrated by the successive encounters with the wall, Van Buren completely withdrew from politics and returned to live in Lindenwald Manor. For more than a decade, in addition to writing books and traveling to European countries, Van Buren spent most of his time with his father and elders in his hometown, taking care of the farmland and fishing, and lived a rather comfortable life.
Van Buren Cemetery
After the outbreak of the Civil War, Van Buren, although he did not completely abandon his moderate stance toward slavery, still fully supported the federal government in waging a civil war against the southern secession, which was praised by President Lincoln. On July 24, 1862, in the midst of the fierce civil war, Van Buren died at Lindenwald Manor at the age of 79. Due to the ineffective response to the economic crisis, Van Buren was still criticized and criticized many years after his death, and the historical image was quite poor.
bibliography
Alan Brinkley (U.S.): A History of the United States, Hainan Publishing House, 2014.
Lin Tao and Pei Yingqin: The Complete Biography of the President of the United States, Current Affairs Press, 2004.