By mid-January 1861 a sleepless President James Buchanan contemplated the remaining seven weeks of his presidency. Above all, he hoped to avoid the outbreak of civil war. He had come to Washington as a northern Democrat who, through training, background and conviction, believed himself well positioned to solve the sectional crisis.
Four years later, nearing his 70th birthday, Buchanan wanted nothing more than to return to Wheatland, his home in Lancaster, Pa. He envisioned sitting at the mahogany desk in his study, explaining in his memoirs that the fault rested with the extremists in the north, who refused to allow southern slaveholders their constitutional right to take slaves into the territories. He had always despised Republicans like William Seward and even President-elect Abraham Lincoln who threatened “the domestic institution” of slavery. One had only to consider John Brown’s recent raid to understand the need to protect southern rights.
In the second week of January 1861 Buchanan had received the attorney general from South Carolina, who brought an ominous letter from that state’s governor, Francis Pickens, demanding that Fort Sumter, the flash point of attention, be handed over to South Carolina. It was a federal installation, and to do so would be treason. As commander-in chief, he had never sent troops or naval forces in previous instances when states had taken over installations in Texas or off the coast of Florida. But his new cabinet threatened to resign if he ordered Major Anderson back to the less fortified, landlocked Fort Moultrie. “No man can stand with you,” his new attorney general, Jeremiah Black, had warned.
In this crisis Buchanan missed the congeniality of his former cabinet. Four of the original seven had been large slaveholders, and his special pet, Secretary of Treasury Howell Cobb of Georgia, had once owned over a thousand slaves. Gone in these frantic chaotic days when “calamities never came alone” were the daily meetings that served as family occasions for a lonely bachelor. As the president looked to the past with the future spinning out of control, they might have discussed what had gone wrong, though he had never considered such meetings as give and take sessions because he knew the answer: The fault lay with the aggressive northern Republicans who refused to protect the rights of southerners.
Buchanan had come to office with the best credentials of any president in American history. He had served in his state legislature, been elected to a congressional and senate seat from Pennsylvania and been considered for a Supreme Court seat. He even had foreign policy experience, as James Polk’s secretary of state and Franklin Pierce’s minister to the Court of St. James.
But there were troubling signs: Buchanan had won the 1856 three-way election among a Democrat, Republican and Know Nothing with 45 percent of the popular vote and the electoral vote of only five northern states. He paid little attention and gave jubilant supporters the watchwords of his forthcoming administration. The Republicans were a “dangerous geographical party. It was the southern people who still cherish a love for the Union.” And as president he would protect them.
Buchanan found the solution to the nation’s divisions in the Dred Scott case, then before the Supreme Court after a long history before lower courts. As president-elect, in a high-handed violation of the separation of powers, he had even urged Supreme Court Justice Grier of Tennessee to find a comprehensive judgment that moved beyond the particulars of Dred Scott’s individual status into that of all black Americans — slave and free, North and South. When such a decision was reached, slaveowners could take slaves everywhere. Buchanan’s goal of national harmony and constitutional government was enacted.
But like his predecessors, Buchanan was soon entangled in the controversial issue of slavery in Kansas. He intended to create a coalition of free-soil and proslave Democrats with partisan politics trumping any division over slavery, now protected by the Dred Scott decision as private property. But amid electoral fraud and violence there were two competing territorial governments in Kansas, one with a proslavery legislature and judiciary near Lecompton, the other a free-state government located in Topeka.
Of course, Buchanan supported the former, and when the Lecompton territorial government produced a constitution favoring slavery (boycotted by free-soil Kansans who represented the state’s majority), Buchanan made the issue into an administrative measure, a litmus test for party loyalty.
Delighted southerners now watched an unlikely slave state transformed into a probable one. But aggrieved northerners, even members of his party like Stephen Douglas, saw the destruction of their party in the president’s inability to treat both sides fairly. Even the lavish use of the patronage did not win a majority in the House of Representatives. Buchanan had split the last remaining national organization in the United States.
The last year of Buchanan’s presidency was the worst year of his life. His cabinet officers were among the most corrupt in American history. As southerners, their scandalous behavior included, in Secretary of War John Floyd’s case, sending federal arms to the future states of the Confederacy. Then, on Christmas night 1860, Major Anderson moved to Fort Moultrie, irritating South Carolinians whom Buchanan had spent four years appeasing. And while the president had approved one expedition supplying Anderson, he refused a more realistic one, proposed by Captain Gustavus Fox, to reinforce Fort Sumter using warships.
On March 4, 1861, Buchanan’s tenure ended. As Buchanan and Lincoln rode back from the Capitol, Buchanan turned to the new president and said, “If you are as happy in entering the White House as I am in returning to Wheatland, you are a happy man.”
The question remains why such an experienced and intelligent president failed so miserably. Americans lavish attention on their successful presidents; yet there is much to be learned from our presidential failures. Buchanan did not suffer from feebleness or age or the insufficient powers of 19th century executives. Rather, he failed because he used that power with such partiality as an activist, ideologically driven executive. He had chosen sides in the great crisis and did not listen.
Negligent about slavery, but greatly attached to the values of white southerners, he went beyond political custom by castigating Republicans as disloyal. Yet his vision for the future of the United States was at odds with most Americans, whose definition of freedom did not include a slave republic dominated by a minority of slave owners. In one of the essential ingredients of successful leadership, Buchanan had failed to interpret his nation. Tragically, his administration served to encourage the future enemies of the republic as he gave the Confederate States of America precious time and support to organize for war.
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