Martin Van Buren Jr.

Martin was the third of the Van Buren boys. On December 20, 1812, he was born in Hudson, New York, where the elder Martin and his wife Hannah were living at the time. He was six years old when his mother passed away from tuberculosis, and, like most of his brothers, he was raised by his mother’s family after Van Buren left for Washington, D.C. The record for Martin Jr. has several blanks until he joined his father in Washington, D.C. upon his election as president. Martin Jr. was 25 when his father was elected president, and he performed a number of tasks in the capitol as part of his father’s administration. He served as a clerk and even held an official post as Secretary of the General Land Office in 1839. Sometime during his father’s term, Martin Jr. struck up a friendship with Elizabeth Blair that would last the rest of his life. "Lizzie," as Martin Jr. sometimes called her, was the daughter of Francis Preston Blair, a key political figure in D.C. and friend of the elder Martin Van Buren. Elizabeth and Martin Jr. exchanged hundreds of letters throughout the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. A trove of these letters have recently been transcribed, and they provide a fascinating window into the Van Buren family as well as Martin Jr.’s life. The letters show Martin Jr.’s interest in a number of gentlemanly occupations of the time, including fishing, hunting, molding his own bullets, and smoking cigars.

At some point in the early 1840s, Martin Jr. contracted tuberculosis. For a long period, his health would remain relatively stable. Although he moved into Lindenwald with his father after his father’s presidency, he was not an invalid. He still wrote of duck hunting and other outdoor activities during this period. He and his father tried various treatments, such as hydrotherapy, to cure or at least mitigate his symptoms. In one particularly charming letter, Martin Jr. mentions that his father got him a hunting dog in the hopes that some time outside and good air would treat him well. Unfortunately, as with his mother many years earlier, Martin Jr.’s health eventually began to decline. In the early 1850s, his condition worsened significantly, and the attempts to find someone who could cure him grew more desperate. This eventually led to a trip to Europe in 1853, but unfortunately, there was no cure to be found. Together, Martin Jr. and his father visited England and France, but on March 19, 1855, Martin Jr. passed away in Paris. His remains were returned to the United States the next month and he was buried in the Kinderhook Cemetery, where he, his father, and mother now all rest.

Martin Jr. never married or had children. His death was one of the factors that drove his father to begin writing his own memoirs. In one of his rare showcases of emotion, Martin Sr. dedicated a small passage to the preparatory work Martin Jr had done for him; "a complete analysis of the Political History of New York by Judge Hammond, made for me by my much beloved and lamented son Martin, who had, as I find from his papers, with the affectionate forethought that characterized him, devoted much of his time to similar occupations in anticipation of my wants and wishes."