The Panic of 1837 had its start with Andrew Jackson's financial policies. As the first president from what was then the West, Andrew Jackson believed that eastern bankers and business interests held their ground with the money. In response, Jackson had withdrawn government funds from the Bank of the United States, located in Philadelphia and was mainly privately owned, and deposited them in state banks around the country. The result was a great deal of many different investments, followed by a sudden loss of confidence in the banks and a financial collapse that was brought upon Martin Van Buren when he had barely taken office.
Van Buren handled the crisis quietly. After allowing all of this settle down, he called a special session of Congress to put forward a legislation creating an independent treasury system for government funds. He also made loans available to local banks.
He liked to keep a policy on neutrality on foreign events. He was president when the Amistad incident erupted and he was a consummate political craftsman at the time. Martin Van Buren had come to power by assembling the Democratic Party, an entity that in turn had laid the foundations of the American party system itself and thereby fundamentally restructured the way American politics worked. He was a man trying to make new, delicate mechanisms of national politics function over the 1830s-a position that powerfully shaped his view of the Amistad revolt.
