THE 8th vice president and the 12th secretary of state. But most importantly , the 8th president of the United States; Martin Van Buren. Or as some people call him Martin Van Ruin. Van Buren was one of those controversial kind of guys; some people liked him some people did not but he had very many successful things but some ... unsuccessful things in his presidency. To start, he was said to be one the most important politicians in American History, his goals were to build an effective and efficient political organization but he realized weaknesses, he "set about to rectify them by constructing a a cohesive and unified political organization " he avoided war, and he even help create the Democratic Party! On the other hand , his fails might out-weigh his success. Out of all failures he's probably made, there are 3 major fails that lead to more chaos and a big uproar. The first is a problem with Great Britain. This happened just after Van Buren took office. After an unsuccessful uprising, the United States recruited a number of American citizens to their cause, and took refuge on an island in the Niagara River ( which divides US and Canada ) Some Americans began selling guns and supplies to the Canadians and Britain then heard about this and told Canada the need to destroy the ship holding the sellers. The Canadians burned the ship killing one American, in return US declared war on England and burned a British Ship. The criticism Van Buren took led to his opponents filing substantial indictment against his presidency. In his presidency Van Buren's number 1 priority was the Panic of 1837. The Panic of 1837 was a financial panic ; citizens rushed to exchanged their paper money for hard currency but English banks had stopped pumping money into the American economy. English banks had to call in loans after British banks cut the money supply. This caused state banks to deplete their own reserves, interest rates rose over 20% as well as inflation devaluing all liquid assets. With all this happening Van Buren decided to do nothing. Lastly, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 where Van Buren and his administration removed Cherokees and other natives tribes out of their homes so they could move them west of the Mississippi River. This resulted in death of over a quarter of the Cherokee tribe . |
Presidency
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