James Buchanan

• 1. Introduction

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  James Buchanan was born on the 23rd of April 1791, in a log cabin at the Stony Batter farm near Cove Gap in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania. He died on the 1st of June 1868, ranked by historians as one of the worst presidents the United States has ever had. How does a man who spent decades in government, who served in both houses of Congress, who negotiated treaties with Russia and Britain, and who oversaw the largest territorial expansion in American history, end up presiding over the near-dissolution of the nation he swore to protect? The story of Buchanan's rise and fall is not simply a story of failure. It is a story of a man whose convictions, built over half a century of public life, led him to choices that brought the country to the edge of war. What did he believe, and why? How did the Dred Scott case come to be handed to him before it was handed to the nation? And what exactly did he do, and refuse to do, as Southern states walked out of the Union one by one?

• 2. Ambition and Ascent

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  By 1821, practicing law in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Buchanan was earning over $11,000 per year. He had begun his career as a Federalist, winning a seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1814 as its youngest member, but the party was dying and Buchanan adapted. He aligned himself with Andrew Jackson's Democrats and built a political coalition in Pennsylvania that would carry him upward for decades.

  His time in the U.S. House stretched across five terms. He prosecuted a federal judge in an impeachment trial and became chairman of the Judiciary Committee. When Jackson was re-elected in 1832, he sent Buchanan to St. Petersburg as minister to Russia, a posting Buchanan viewed as political exile. Still, he negotiated a trade treaty there and then returned to win a seat in the U.S. Senate, where he served for eleven years.

  Buchanan was appointed Secretary of State under President James K. Polk in 1845. During his tenure the United States recorded its largest territorial expansion through the Oregon Treaty and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. He was never far from the question of slavery, arguing that the institution fell exclusively under the authority of the states and that abolitionists were the agitators who made resolution impossible. Beginning in 1844 he became a regular contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, which finally came to him in 1856 only after seventeen convention ballots and Senator Stephen A. Douglas withdrew from contention.

• 3. The Dred Scott Bargain

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  Associate Justice Robert Cooper Grier leaked the outcome of the Dred Scott case to Buchanan before a word of it reached the public. Buchanan had written to Grier in early 1857, pressing him to join the Southern majority on the court so that its decision could be issued on broad grounds rather than narrow ones. Grier complied. Two days after Buchanan was inaugurated as the 15th president, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered a ruling that declared Congress had no constitutional power to exclude slavery from the territories, that slaves were forever the property of their owners without rights, and that no African American could be a full citizen of the United States.

  Buchanan had foreshadowed this in his inaugural address, telling the nation the slavery question in the territories would be settled "speedily and finally" by the Supreme Court, while already knowing what that settlement would be. Historian Paul Finkelman later wrote that Buchanan knew every detail of what Taney would say before he urged the country to accept the decision. Historian David W. Blight argued in 2022 that the year 1857 was "the great pivot on the road to disunion... largely because of the Dred Scott case, which stoked the fear, distrust and conspiratorial hatred already common in both the North and the South to new levels of intensity."

  Rather than laying sectional divisions to rest as Buchanan had hoped, the ruling infuriated Northerners. The Republican platform, which Buchanan had counted on destroying, was only strengthened by the decision.

• 4. Kansas and the Party Split

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  The Kansas Territory had two governments by the late 1850s: an antislavery government in Topeka and a pro-slavery government in Lecompton. Buchanan chose to back Lecompton. In December 1857, he met with Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, and told him that supporting the Lecompton Constitution had become an administration requirement for Democratic officeholders. Douglas refused.

  On the 2nd of February 1858, Buchanan transmitted the Lecompton Constitution to Congress and recommended Kansas's admission under it as a slave state. He made every effort to secure the votes needed, offering patronage appointments and cash. The Senate approved it, but a combination of Republicans, Know-Nothings, and Northern Democrats defeated it in the House. In August 1858, Kansas voters themselves rejected the Lecompton Constitution by a wide margin.

  Buchanan's response to Douglas's defection was to purge every Douglas supporter from federal patronage in Illinois and Washington, D.C. He ran candidates against the Douglas Democrats in the 1858 Illinois legislative elections, even at the risk of throwing seats to Republicans. The strategy produced the famous series of debates between Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. Douglas held his Senate seat, but the broader war inside the Democratic Party had grown irreparable. By 1860 the party split formally at its national convention, first in Charleston and then in Baltimore. Buchanan, nursing his grudge against Douglas, failed to push the factions together and gave only tepid backing to his Vice President John C. Breckinridge, the southern candidate. With a divided Democratic Party, Republican Abraham Lincoln won the presidency. Buchanan became the last Democrat to win a presidential election until Grover Cleveland in 1884.

• 5. The Secession Winter

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  Winfield Scott warned Buchanan as early as October 1860 that Lincoln's election would likely cause at least seven states to leave the Union. Scott recommended deploying massive amounts of federal troops and artillery to Southern states to protect federal property. Buchanan distrusted Scott and did not act on the advice.

  South Carolina seceded on the 20th of December 1860. In his final address to Congress ten days earlier, Buchanan denied that states had the right to secede, but simultaneously declared the federal government had no power to stop them. The address satisfied no one. The North heard a president who would not act; the South heard a president who would not recognize their claimed right. Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb resigned five days after the speech.

  Buchanan refused to dismiss Interior Secretary Jacob Thompson even after Thompson was chosen as Mississippi's agent for secession discussions. He refused to fire Secretary of War John B. Floyd despite an embezzlement scandal. Floyd resigned on his own, but not before transferring firearms to Southern states that eventually reached the Confederacy. Buchanan's friend Rose O'Neal Greenhow used her proximity to the president to gather intelligence for the Confederacy.

  On the 5th of January 1861, Buchanan sent the ship Star of the West toward Fort Sumter carrying 250 men and supplies. He failed, however, to order Major Robert Anderson to provide covering fire for the vessel, and the ship was turned back without delivering anyone. Six more slave states had seceded by the end of January. Buchanan received a March 3 message from Anderson reporting that supplies were running critically low, but Lincoln was sworn in the next day, and the response was now Lincoln's to make.

• 6. The Private Man

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  Buchanan suffered from esotropia, a condition that caused one eye to turn inward. One eye was short-sighted and the other far-sighted, so he bent his head forward and leaned it to one side during social interactions, a habit that drew ridicule from political opponents including Henry Clay.

  In 1818, Buchanan met Anne Caroline Coleman at a ball in Lancaster. Her father Robert Coleman was a wealthy iron manufacturer from County Donegal in Ulster, the same region Buchanan's own father had emigrated from. The two were engaged by 1819. Rumors reached Anne that Buchanan's interest was in her fortune rather than in her. She broke off the engagement, and on the 9th of December 1819, died at her sister's home in Philadelphia at age 23. Biographer Philip Shriver Klein later wrote that she appeared to have died from a laudanum overdose, though whether it was taken by instruction, by accident, or by intent was never established. Buchanan wrote to her father asking to attend the funeral; the request was refused. He was the only president of the United States who never married.

  From 1834 until 1844, Buchanan shared a Washington boardinghouse with William Rufus DeVane King, an Alabama senator who also never married. They attended social functions together regularly. Andrew Jackson mockingly called them "Miss Nancy" and "Aunt Fancy." Buchanan's Postmaster General Aaron V. Brown referred to King as Buchanan's "better half" and "wife." King died of tuberculosis shortly after Franklin Pierce's inauguration. Buchanan described him as "among the best, the purest and most consistent public men I have known." Biographer Jean H. Baker believes their surviving letters illustrate only "the affection of a special friendship," though she suggests some correspondence may have been destroyed by their nieces.

• 7. Ruin and Reputation

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  Buchanan retired to his estate at Wheatland in Lancaster Township when Lincoln was inaugurated. The Civil War began one month later. He supported the Union and urged fellow Pennsylvania Democrats to enlist, writing that the assault on Fort Sumter was "the commencement of war by the Confederate states, and no alternative was left but to prosecute it with vigor."

  The public did not forgive him. He received hate mail and threatening letters every day. Stores in Lancaster displayed his likeness with the eyes inked red, a noose drawn around his neck, and the word "TRAITOR" written across his forehead. The Senate proposed a resolution of condemnation, which ultimately failed. Five of his former cabinet members took positions in the Lincoln administration but refused to defend him publicly.

  In 1866, Buchanan published his fullest defense under the title Mr. Buchanan's Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion. In it he blamed the crisis on the "long, active, and persistent hostility" of Northern abolitionists and on the corresponding resistance of slavery's defenders. He expressed satisfaction with his own decisions, even during the secession crisis, and directed blame toward Robert Anderson, Winfield Scott, and Congress. He caught a cold in May 1868, which worsened rapidly. He died of respiratory failure on the 1st of June 1868, at Wheatland, at the age of 77, and was buried at Woodward Hill Cemetery in Lancaster.

  Historian Jean Baker wrote in 2004 that Buchanan's failure was not inactivity but partiality for the South, calling him "the most dangerous of chief executives, a stubborn, mistaken ideologue whose principles held no room for compromise." A bronze and granite memorial to him stands near the southeast corner of Meridian Hill Park in Washington, D.C., sculpted by Maryland artist Hans Schuler, unveiled on the 26th of June 1930. Its engraved text calls him "the incorruptible statesman whose walk was upon the mountain ranges of the law," a description drawn from the words of his own cabinet member Jeremiah S. Black.