bargain martin van buren decides that he's going to get jackson in the presidency, but the story is a lot deeper. because you see what van buren was really trying to do was to create a political party that could keep a civil war from happening. he would do this by making sure that slavery could not be attacked even as the northern and midwestern states began to add more and more free soil senators and representatives to congress where sooner or later they would act on slavery. how do we keep this from happening van buren asked and his answer was money. will buy these people off. okay, even if you're an anti-slaver from pennsylvania, we'll give you a government job if you just shut up and follow along with the system. we called it the spoils system or patronage. and as a result and van buren didn't get this because his goal is to keep the federal government small and the states stronger what he had done inadvertently was to create a system in which the federal government began to grow with every single election because you had to give away jobs to get elected and by the way the most po