All the Presidents Wives 8

HANNAH HOES VAN BUREN

Birth:

8 March, 1783 Kinderhook, New York

Father:

Johannes Dircksen Hoes, born 25 May, 1753, Kinderhook, New York, farmer, died, 25 January, 1789

Mother:

Maria Quakenbush, born 26 January, 1754, Kinderhook, New York; married 4 February, 1776; died, 5 December, 1852

Ancestry:

Dutch;

All of Hannah Van Buren's ancestors were from Holland, the last immigrating to New York state colony after 1675. Through both paternal and maternal lines, Hannah Van Buren and Martin Van Buren were closely related, their ancestors all coming from the small Dutch community of Kinderhook. Through her mother Maria Quakenbush she was related to Elizabeth Monroe and the Roosevelts.

Birth Order and Siblings:

Birth order not known, one sister, one brother;

Maria Hoes Van Dyck (?-?), John Cantine Hoes (?-1867);

Hannah Van Buren's sister Maria married the Reverend Lawrence H. Van Dyck of Stone Arabia, New York.

Her brother John Cantine Hoes, was installed as pastor of the Chittenango Falls, New York Presbyterian Church, remaining until 1837, when he resigned to go to Ithaca, New York and head another church. His only son was a chaplain in the navy.

Physical Appearance:

Blonde hair, blue eyes

Religious Affiliation:

Dutch Reformed Church, later attended and joined Presbyterian Church in Albany, New York

Education:

Hannah Van Buren was taught in a local Kinderhook school by master Vrouw Lange; Dutch was her first language

Occupation before Marriage:

No documentation of her life previous to marriage; it is highly likely that Hannah Van Buren lived as all residents of the insular community of Kinderhook did, speaking Dutch with their fellow townspeople and English with outsiders and tending to the chores of a rural life in an isolated Hudson River community. It is legend that she and Martin Van Buren were sweethearts since childhood, when he left town at age 20 to train in the law in New York City. She remained in Kinderhook. They did not marry immediately upon his return but waited until he had first established a law practice with his half-brother.

Marriage:

24 years old to Martin Van Buren (5 December 1782 - 24 July, 1862), lawyer, on 21 February 1807 at the Huxton House (owned by her brother-in-law) in Catskill, New York;

the Dutch Reformed Church ceremony was performed by Judge Moses Cantine. The couple settled in Kinderhook.

Children:

Five sons, one daughter;

daughter, stillborn birth, date unknown;

Abraham Van Buren (27 November, 1807 - 15 March, 1873), John Van Buren (18 February, 1810 - 13, October, 1866), Martin Van Buren, Jr. (20 December, 1812 - 19 March, 1855), Winfield Scott Van Buren (born and died in 1814), Smith Thompson (16 January, 1817 - 1876)

Occupation after Marriage:

A year after their marriage, Martin and Hannah Van Buren moved from Kinderhook to the larger but nearby town of Hudson, New York, the county seat. He became immediately involved in the local Democratic Party and was named to a county position. Following his 1812 election to the state senate, Hannah Van Buren and her family moved to Albany, New York, the state capital city. Martin Van Buren made many friends and formed a multitude of political alliances, organized his own supporters and practiced patronage in an unprecedented manner, creating one of the first "political machine" in American politics. For Hannah Van Buren this meant that her home was frequently filled with her husband's cronies and aides, lawyers and other men of influence in the state. Her own life was focused on raising four sons (she gave birth to six children within ten years), and her church. Coming from a strong religious background, there is some suggestion that Hannah Van Buren also devoted herself to the charitable efforts of the local Presbyterian Church that she joined in Albany, there not being a Dutch Reformed Church in the city. Slow to recover from the birth of her fifth child in 1817, she died of tuberculosis in Albany. At her request, the custom of providing scarves for the pallbearers to wear at the funeral was abandoned and the money set aside to pay for them was used to feed the poor. Even though it was claimed that her husband had said that Hannah Van Buren was the guiding force in his life, she was never mentioned in the nearly 800 pages of his autobiography.

Death:

5 February, 1819 Albany, New York

Burial:

Second Presbyterian Church cemetery, Albany, New York Re-interred at Kinderhook cemetery, Kinderhook, New York, 1855

The Van Buren Administration:

4 March, 1837- 4 March, 1841

For the first year and eight months of the Martin Van Buren presidency, there was no First Lady in the White House. Van Buren had been a widower for 18 years and he had no daughters, nor were there any women relatives of his, or spouses of Cabinet members that he either invited to preside as hostess at the White House or aid him in his own decisions regarding entertaining and decorating of the mansion's rooms. Following the marriage of his eldest son Abraham Van Buren to Angelica Singleton, the President designated his new daughter-in-law to assume the hostess role.

Angelica Singleton was the daughter of South Carolina planter Richard Singleton and Rebecca Travis Coles Singleton. She was born in Sumter, South Carolina on February 13, 1816 and raised there at the family plantation, Home Place. During the late 1820's and early 1830's she attended Madame Grelaud's Seminary in Philadelphia along with her older sister Marion. Such seminaries offered young ladies instruction in subjects such as grammar, languages, deportment, history, and music.

After leaving school, Angelica Singleton came with her sister Marion to spend a social season (1837-1838) in the nation's capital with the family of her mother's cousin, Senator William Campbell Preston, the intention being to find an eligible husband. Another cousin of her mother, former First Lady Dolley Madison, then living in Washington across the street from the White House, introduced her to Washington society. This included an 1837 dinner at the White House with the President Martin Van Buren and his eldest son and personal secretary, Captain Abraham Van Buren, West Point graduate and military leader in the Seminole Indian War. Angelica and Abraham married a year later, in November 1838. The President reportedly approved of the marriage and the ties it brought between the White House and the powerful Southern aristocracy. As a northern Democrat, he was finding himself in an increasingly politically tenuous situation between the abolitionist sentiments of the New York machine that had supported and elected him and the rising hostility of southern Democrats who resolved to strengthen states rights as the way to ensure that slavery continued to support their agrarian economic system.

After an extended European honeymoon that included being presented in the royal courts of England and France, Angelica Van Buren returned in 1839 with her husband to live in the White House and to serve as its hostess for Van Buren's remaining years in office. She sought to emulate the receiving and entertaining techniques she witnessed in European palaces. According to contemporary reports, Mrs. Van Buren was widely admired in Washington; the French minister Adolphe Fourier de Bacourt, generally critical of Americans, remarked that she had graceful manners and an appearance that could pass muster with the elite of Europe. The United States was then suffering an economic depression. Angelica Van Buren's receiving style of forming a tableau with other young women set apart from the crowds and nodding to them, as well as the alleged plans she had for relandscaping the White House grounds into a plan that replicated those she had seen in the royal houses of Europe were fodder for a famous political attack on her father-in-law by a Pennsylvania Whig Congressman Charles Ogle. Ogle referred obliquely to Angelica Van Buren as a member of the president's household in his famous "Gold Spoon" speech. The attack was delivered in 1841 in Congress and the general depiction of the President as being monarchial in his lifestyle contributed to his failure to achieve re-election during the 1840 campaign.

When the Administration ended in March 1841, Angelica and Abram Van Buren first visited with her family in Sumter, South Carolina. There, Angelica Van Buren gave birth to the first of three sons, Singleton (a daughter born during her residency in the White House had lived only a few hours); two more sons, Travis and Martin III, were born in New York State. The family eventually settled at Van Buren's estate, Lindenwald, in Kinderhook, New York. The family continued to winter in South Carolina, and Angelica Van Buren later inherited Home Place. In 1848 she, her husband and their sons moved to New York City, where Angelica Van Buren was known for her charitable work. With the outbreak of the Civil War, however, she had to balance her allegiances to both the South through her birth family, and the North through her married family. Her only tangible support of the Confederacy was to send necessary supplies like blankets to those captured soldiers suffering in prison under deplorable conditions. She died in New York City on December 29, 1878.

http://www.firstladies.org/biographies/