When Martin Van Buren arrived in Washington to be sworn in as a senator in 1821, he told a friend he planned to “build up a party” for himself. It was an odd time to be party-mongering, and Van Buren an unlikely party-monger. Republican James Monroe had run unopposed in the 1820 presidential election, and “every politician in Washington, with varying degrees of enthusiasm … was calling himself a Republican,” writes James M. Bradley in Martin Van Buren: America’s First Politician, a lively and illuminating new biography of our eighth president—the first to be born a U.S. citizen. Absent a strong opposition party, Van Buren lamented that politicians were appealing less to ideals and more to personalities, and wished, as he put it in an 1827 letter, to unite citizens through “party principle,” rather than “personal preference.”

The eighth president had a commode fit for a commander-in-chief at Lindenwald, his home in Kinderhook, New York.