#8 Martin Van Buren

1837--1841

--Martin Van Buren was the first president born an American citizen (all of his predecessors were born British subjects, before the Declaration of Independence).

--One of his nicknames was "The Little Magician". Another, "Old Kinderhook", was

a reference to the village of Van Buren’s birth in upstate New York. In fact, his supporters often called themselves "the OK Club", and the term "OK", which had been an obscure variation of "all correct", perhaps grew more popular around that time due to its connection to the president.

--Van Buren was the first U.S. president not of British descent (his ancestors were Dutch), and the only president to date for whom english was his second language.

--His great-grandfather was a Dutch fairy elf (known in the Netherlands as a "nisse"), from whom Van Buren inherited his terrible temper and insatiable appetite for porridge.

#7 Andrew Jackson

1829--1837

--As president, Jackson dismantled the Second Bank of the United States and initiated forced relocation and resettlement of Native American tribes from the Southeast to west of the Mississippi River with the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

--Jackson lived for nearly forty years with a bullet lodged in his chest that he had acquired in a duel; it was too near his heart to be surgically removed.

--For a time Jackson had two unofficial "First Ladies"--his deceased wife's niece, Emily Donalson, and his daughter-in-law Sarah Yorke Jackson--who shared hosting duties at the White House.

-- In 1835 Richard Lawrence, an unemployed and deranged house-painter from England, either burst from a crowd or stepped out from hiding behind a column and aimed a pistol at Jackson, which misfired. Lawrence then pulled out a second pistol, which also misfired. It has been postulated that moisture from the humid weather contributed to the double misfiring. Lawrence was then restrained, with legend saying that Jackson attacked Lawrence with his cane, prompting his aides to restrain him. Others present, including Davey Crockett (really), restrained and disarmed Lawrence.

--Thanks to an unholy pact made with dark forces, the only way to kill Jackson was to separate his head from his body, burn both separately, and scatter the ashes in different directions.

#6 John Quincy Adams

1825--1829

--Adams was the son of President John Adams and Abigail Adams, and was the first president whose father had also been president (George W Bush and George H.W. Bush being the only other example to date). The name "Quincy" came from Abigail's maternal grandfather, Colonel John Quincy.

--As a diplomat, Adams was involved in many international negotiations, and helped formulate the Monroe Doctrine as Secretary of State. Historians agree he was one of the great diplomats in American history.

--Adams would swim naked in the Potomac river every morning at 5 o'clock when he was president, back when doing such a thing was considered "being folksy" instead of "being creepy". He also had a pet alligator that he kept in the East Room of the White House (the alligator was "re-gifted" to Adams by the Marquis de Lafayette during his tour of America in 1824/25).

--Adams was elected a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts after leaving office, the only president ever to do so, serving for the last 17 years of his life with far greater success than he had achieved as president. In the House he became a leading opponent of slavery and argued that if a civil war ever broke out the president could abolish slavery by using his broad war powers, which Abraham Lincoln partially did during the American Civil War with the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Deeply troubled by slavery, Adams correctly predicted the dissolution of the Union on the issue, though the series of bloody slave insurrections he foresaw never came to pass.

--Much of Adams' youth was spent accompanying his father overseas. John Adams served as an American envoy to France from 1778 until 1779 and to the Netherlands from 1780 until 1782, and the younger Adams accompanied his father on these journeys. At some point during his stay in the Netherlands, John Quincy was secretly kidnapped by Dutch elves and replaced with a doppleganger, and in fact this fey doppleganger remains the only fully non-human U.S. president to date (Martin Van Buren was mostly human).

#5 James Monroe

1817--1825

--James Monroe was the last founding father of the United States to become president.

He was also the last U.S. president to wear a powdered wig.

--Monroe is most noted for his proclamation in 1823 of the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that

the United States would not tolerate further European intervention in the Americas. It boldly

asserted the status of the United States as a full-fledged nation, and this gained the administration popular support during a time of increased nationalism.

--Most historians label Monroe’s first term “The Era of Good Feelings”, partly because there was a near total lack of partisan politics (the Federalist party dissolved while the Democratic-Republican party was largely inactive).

--The capital city of the West African country of Liberia is named Monrovia. It is the only non-American capital city named after a U.S. president. 

--James Monroe died on July 4th, 1831. He was the third president to die on the 4th of July (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day five years before Monroe). Also, Zachary Taylor was stricken ill on July 4th, and died days afterward. In light of this, every president since Taylor spends each 4th of July encased in a sterile steel tube surrounded by armed guards.

#4 James Madison

1809--1817

--James Madison was the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution. The first president to have served in the United States Congress, he was a leader in the 1st U.S. Congress, drafting many basic laws, and was responsible for the first ten amendments to the Constitution and thus is also known as the "Father of the Bill of Rights". As a political theorist, Madison's most distinctive belief was that the new republic needed checks and balances to protect individual rights from the tyranny of the majority.

--Madison and Thomas Jefferson organized the Democratic-Republican party, which became one of the first two U.S. political parties, in opposition to Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Party.

--Madison was 5' 6" tall (at most), and never weighed much more than 100 lbs. Though he was often sickly and had a delicate constitution, he lived into his mid-eighties and was the last of the founding fathers to die.

--He was the first president to wear long trousers (all the previous presidents wore knee breeches).

--Madison is the only U.S. president to authorize an invasion of Canada (so far...).

--James Madison wrote what would become the Federalist Papers along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, under the shared pen name "Publius". Other Madison pen names of note include "A Principled Farmer", "Hugh Jass", "Napoleon Dynamite", and "Percival Q. Thunderfoot".

#3 Thomas Jefferson

1801--1809

--Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence included a passage critical of the slave trade, but it was deleted along with a fourth of the original draft when it was revised by the Continental Congress. At the time, Jefferson owned over forty slaves (over the course of his life Jefferson would own some 600 slaves).

--As president, Jefferson began the controversial process of Native American tribe removal to the newly organized Louisiana Territory in 1803, and signed the Act of Prohibiting Importation of Slaves in 1807 (this stated that no new slaves were permitted to be imported to the United States). He also commissioned the creation of the Corps of Discovery, a special unit of the U.S. Army from which the Lewis & Clark Expedition, among others, was born.

--While he was president, Jefferson had the bones of a mastodon sent to the White House, and laid them out in the East Room in an attempt to build the skeleton.

--In 1814 the Library of Congress was attacked by British troops and all the books were burned. Jefferson offered his personal library as a replacement, and the next year the Library was restocked with all 6,487 of Jefferson's books.

--In his spare time Jefferson would submit lurid short stories to newspapers and various journals anonymously (under the pen-name "A Correspondent from Virginia") in which Jefferson was a cultured, gentleman gunfighter who frequently helped clients for reward. This premise was later adapted into "Have Gun--Will Travel", a popular American TV show that aired on CBS from 1957 through 1963.

#2 John Adams

1797--1801

--A key founding father, it was Adams who nominated George Washington as commander-in-chief of the continental army. He also argued for bicameral legislation and a three-way division of powers between an executive, legislative, and judicial branch of government. 

-- Adams was a member of the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence (along with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman). The committee in general--including Jefferson--thought that Adams should write the document, but Adams insisted that Jefferson was the better choice. 

--Adams was the first U.S. vice-president, and found the job "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived".

-- In his final months in office, Adams became the first president to occupy the president's mansion (later known as The White House), though it was still unfinished at the time.

--Sixteen months before Adams' death, his son, John Quincy Adams, became the 6th president of the United States.

--Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4th, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the vote to approve the Declaration of Independence.

--While in England in 1786, Adams and Jefferson visited William Shakespeare's home in Stratford-upon-Avon and chipped off a piece of Shakespeare's chair as a souvenir, bringing about "The Curse of the Bard", which stated that anyone who damaged a piece of Shakespeare's furniture would die exactly 40 years later.