A primary founder of the Democratic Party, he served as New York's attorney general, U.S. senator, then briefly as the ninth governor of New York before joining Andrew Jackson's administration as the tenth United States secretary of state, minister to the United Kingdom, and ultimately the eighth vice president when named Jackson's running mate for the 1832 election. Van Buren won the presidency in 1836, lost re-election in 1840, and failed to win the Democratic nomination in 1844. Later in his life, Van Buren emerged as an elder statesman and an important anti-slavery leader who led the Free Soil Party ticket in the 1848 presidential election.
Van Buren was born in Kinderhook, New York, where most residents were of Dutch descent and spoke Dutch as their primary language. 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 have spoken English as a second language. Trained as a lawyer, he entered politics as a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, won a seat in the New York State Senate, and was elected to the United States Senate in 1821. 