Martin Van Buren was to Andrew Jackson what Goats Head Soup was to Exile on Main Street — a much-less-famous-yet-important follow-up. The presidency of this short Dutch guy from upstate New York has sometimes been called “the third term” of Andrew Jackson, but that would be giving short shrift to our nation’s eighth president, sometimes known as “the Magician” or “Matty.”

Van Buren knew how to pull strings, and he essentially founded modern party politics. He had just come into office when the Panic of 1837 hit, so he called Congress into a special session to deal with it. He fought for an independent Treasury. He was the first president to advocate for worker protections, issuing an executive order limiting the workday for federal employees to 10 hours a day.

A lifelong politician, he was elected a New York state senator, attorney general and governor, and also served as U.S. Senator, Secretary of State and Vice President. After he was defeated for re-election in 1840 he ran unsuccessfully for president twice more, in 1844 as a Democrat (he failed to receive the nomination at the party convention despite having won more votes than Polk, who was picked instead), and again in 1848 as a candidate of the anti-slavery Free Soil party (the first time someone had been a contender as a viable third-party candidate). He supported Lincoln in the election of 1860 and died two years later, during the Civil war.

A few other fun facts about MVB:

• He was the first president born after the Declaration of Independence.
• Like Jefferson and Jackson before him, he was a widower.
• He had big, ugly sideburns.
• He’s credited with coining the term “OK.”
• The advice columnist Pauline Phillips (better known as Dear Abby) chose her pen name, Abigail Van Buren, because she thought naming herself after the former president added an air of prestige.

There are not many biographies of Van Buren to choose from. Nothing by Chernow or Isaacson or McCullough. I went with “Martin Van Buren” by Ted Widmer, part of the American President’s Series. It was concise and insightful.

There is so much to say — both good and bad — about number seven. Up until this time, all the presidents had come from Massachusetts or Virginia and were elite and aloof. Andrew Jackson was arguably the first “man of the people” elected to the office. During his first inauguration in 1829, a mob of party crashers bum rushed the White House, stomping all over the place with muddy boots and knocking over furniture to get to the punch bowls. Many observers were aghast at such a shocking breach, but for good or bad the country was now going to be led by the people (provided those people were white and male, of course).

In office for two terms, Jackson expanded the power of the presidency. He was the first to use the veto power to great effect, and he took a hands-on, active role in the crafting legislation. One thing he got Congress to do was pass the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which led to immense suffering and death. The policy was racist, unjust and genocidal, but the growing slave societies in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi needed more land for their plantations and so the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole people had to go. The “Trail of Tears” forced migration of native human beings from the Southeastern United States to what is now Oklahoma would largely come later, but it was Jackson whom we can thank (or blame, depending on what color you are).

Jackson’s biggest presidential achievement was successfully navigating the “nullification crisis” in which South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union over tariffs. Jackson also gets credit (in my view) for taking on the entrenched national bank and its all-powerful, well-connected leader, ending the bank’s charter and sending the country’s cash reserves to state banks. Oh, and he completely eliminated the national debt, too!

He was often called “Old Hickory” or “The General” or “The Hero” (but not “Stonewall Jackson,” who was a totally different person).

As a general during the War of 1812, he had led troops to a glorious, decisive victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans. This single event cemented Jackson’s lifelong fame. The funny thing about it is that unbeknownst to everybody at the time, a treaty ending the war had already been signed, but the American people got news of the battlefield victory first.

Also notable about Jackson: There was tons of turmoil in his cabinet, with mass resignations lots of infighting (it was the first time in history a president had ever replaced his whole cabinet in one fell swoop). Jackson had two bullets lodged in his body, one from a duel in which he killed the other guy. He survived a physical assault and later an assassination attempt (also a first). His wife, Rachel, died after his election but before his inauguration. He was religious in his personal life but was a staunch advocate for the separation of church and state. Also of note to many who might be reading this, Jackson was still president when Michigan became the 26th state in 1837!

When I started reading about our seventh president, I thought he would come across as more of a villain, but I ended up liking him. I read two books: “The Life of Andrew Jackson” (pictured above) by the historian Robert V. Remini, which is a one-volume abridged edition of his much longer three-volume biography; and “American Lion” by Jon Meacham (pictured at left), the highly acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller from 2008. As presidential biographies go, I liked the Remini book much better. It covered Jackson’s entire life, including his humble beginnings in Tennessee, his military campaigns against the Indians, Spanish and British, the Battle of New Orleans, his marriage to Rachel, and much more. I also felt that Remini did a much better job of describing what Jackson was like as a person. But while I felt that I got to know Jackson better from Remini’s book, it was a paragraph at the end of Meacham’s that, for me, sums up the legacy of this important American leader:

“The tragedy of Jackson’s life is that a man dedicated to freedom failed to see liberty as a universal, not a particular, gift,” Meacham writes. “The triumph of his life is that he held together a country whose experiment in liberty ultimately extended its protections and promises to all — belatedly, it is true, but by saving the Union, Jackson kept the possibility of progress alive, a possibility that would have died had secession and separation carried the day.”

In the presidential election of 1824 it was a four-way contest. Andrew Jackson won the popular vote, but none of the candidates had a majority of the electoral votes, thus tossing the election to the House of Representatives to decide. After John Quincy Adams met with Henry Clay, Clay threw his support to Quincy Adams, who became the sixth president. He subsequently appointed Clay Secretary of State, and the whole affair came to be known as the “Corrupt Bargain.” (There is a song about this in the 2010 Broadway musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.”)

As a president, John Quincy Adams did not amount to much. He lacked the support of Congress and of the American people, and he was soundly defeated four years later by Jackson. But it was what John Quincy Adams did BEFORE and AFTER his presidency that really mattered. His true calling was as a diplomat and statesman.

He was only 12 years old when his father took him to France during the American Revolution, and he subsequently traveled to Russia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and England. He was fluent in French, Dutch and German, and as a student he mastered Latin and Greek. George Washington appointed him minister to the Netherlands, and he later became a Senator representing Massachusetts. As Secretary of State under Monroe, he secured more territory for the United States, negotiating with France, England, Spain and Russia.

After his presidency, he was elected nine times to the House of Representatives from his home district in Massachusetts, and he became an outspoken abolitionist. He clashed with the racist southern Democrats, who tried unsuccessfully to shut him up with a “gag rule.” He spearheaded the founding of the Smithsonian Institution. He pushed for more roads, canals and bridges. He encouraged science and advocated observatories for the study of astronomy. Arguing before the Supreme Court, he secured the freedom of African slaves who had revolted aboard the Spanish ship Amistad. He attended every session of Congress. When he was 80 years old, he collapsed on the floor of the House during an important vote and he died right in the Capitol building.

He also went swimming, naked, in the Potomac almost every day, and he wrote poetry and kept an extensive diary. He was the first president to be photographed. In that last session of Congress he also met and served alongside a young Abraham Lincoln, who had just been elected from Illinois.

As presidential biographies go, I found this book by Harlow Giles Unger to be well written and quite a page-turner. Having just read several other much longer biographies of his predecessors, I did notice a few spots where the author glossed over things or inadequately explained stuff, but what the book lacked in long-winded scholarship it more than made up for in heart.

The last few pages brought me to tears. It’s hard to imagine our country becoming great without the lifelong service offered by John Quincy Adams.