page_title: Martin Van Buren
section_title: Presidential election of 1840
hierarchical_section_title: Martin Van Buren / Presidency, 1837–1841 / Presidential election of 1840
context_page_description: Martin Van Buren was an American statesman who served as the eighth president of the United States from 1837 to 1841. A founder of the Democratic Party, he had previously served as the ninth governor of New York, the tenth United States secretary of state, and the eighth vice president of the United States. He won the 1836 presidential election with the endorsement of popular outgoing President Andrew Jackson and the organizational strength of the Democratic Party. He lost his 1840 reelection bid to Whig Party nominee William Henry Harrison, thanks in part to the poor economic conditions surrounding the Panic of 1837. Later in his life, Van Buren emerged as an elder statesman and an important anti-slavery abolitionist leader who led the Free Soil Party ticket in the presidential election of 1848.
  Van Buren was born into a family of Dutch Americans in Kinderhook, New York; he was the first President to have been born after the American Revolution — in which his father served as a Patriot — and is the only President to speak English as a second language.
context_section_description: Van Buren easily won renomination for a second term at the 1840 Democratic National Convention, but he and his party faced a difficult election in 1840. Van Buren's presidency had been a difficult affair, with the U.S. economy mired in a severe downturn, and other divisive issues, such as slavery, western expansion, and tensions with Great Britain, providing opportunities for Van Buren's political opponents—including some of his fellow Democrats—to criticize his actions. Although Van Buren's renomination was never in doubt, Democratic strategists began to question the wisdom of keeping Johnson on the ticket. Even former president Jackson conceded that Johnson was a liability and insisted on former House Speaker James K. Polk of Tennessee as Van Buren's new running mate. Van Buren was reluctant to drop Johnson, who was popular with workers and radicals in the North and added military experience to the ticket, which might prove important against likely Whig nominee William Henry Harrison. Rather than re-nominating Johnson, the Democratic convention decided to allow state Democratic Party leaders to select the vice-presidential candidates for their states.
  Van Buren hoped that the Whigs would nominate Clay for president, which would allow Van Buren to cast the 1840 campaign as a clash between Van Buren's Independent Treasury system and Clay's support for a national bank. However, rather than nominating longtime party spokesmen like Clay and Daniel Webster, the 1839 Whig National Convention nominated Harrison, who had served in various governmental positions during his career and had earned fame for his military leadership in the Battle of Tippecanoe and the War of 1812. Whig leaders like William Seward and Thaddeus Stevens believed that Harrison's war record would effectively counter the popular appeals of the Democratic Party. For vice president, the Whigs nominated former Senator John Tyler of Virginia. Clay was deeply disappointed by his defeat at the convention, but he nonetheless threw his support behind Harrison.
  Whigs presented Harrison as the antithesis of the president, whom they derided as ineffective, corrupt, and effete. Whigs also depicted Van Buren as an aristocrat living in high style in the White House, while they used images of Harrison in a log cabin sipping cider to convince voters that he was a man of the people. They threw such jabs as "Van, Van, is a used-up man" and "Martin Van Ruin" and ridiculed him in newspapers and cartoons. Issues of policy were not absent from the campaign; the Whigs derided the alleged executive overreaches of Jackson and Van Buren, while also calling for a national bank and higher tariffs. Democrats attempted to campaign on the Independent Treasury system, but the onset of deflation undercut these arguments. The enthusiasm for "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too", coupled with the country's severe economic crisis, made it impossible for Van Buren to win a second term. Harrison won by a popular vote of 1,275,612 to 1,130,033, and an electoral vote margin of 234 to 60. An astonishing 80% of eligible voters went to the polls on election day. Van Buren actually won more votes than he had in 1836, but the Whig success in attracting new voters more than canceled out Democratic gains. Additionally, Whigs won majorities for the first time in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
caption: 1840 electoral vote results