James Buchanan
Tall, stately, stiffly formal in the high stock he wore
around his jowls, James Buchanan was the only President who never
married.
Presiding over a rapidly dividing Nation, Buchanan grasped inadequately the
political realities of the time. Relying on constitutional doctrines to close
the widening rift over slavery, he failed to understand that the North would
not accept constitutional arguments which favored the South. Nor could he
realize how sectionalism had realigned political parties: the Democrats split;
the Whigs were destroyed, giving rise to the Republicans.
Born into a well-to-do Pennsylvania family in 1791, Buchanan, a graduate of
Dickinson College, was gifted as a debater and learned in the law.
He was elected five times to the House of Representatives; then, after an interlude as
Minister to Russia, served for a decade in the Senate. He became Polk's Secretary of
State and Pierce's Minister to Great Britain. Service abroad helped to bring him the
Democratic nomination in 1856 because it had exempted him from involvement in bitter
domestic controversies.
As President-elect, Buchanan thought the crisis would disappear if he
maintained a sectional balance in his appointments and could persuade
the people to accept constitutional law as the Supreme Court
interpreted it. The Court was considering the legality of restricting slavery
in the territories, and two justices hinted to Buchanan what the decision would be.
Thus, in his Inaugural the President referred to the territorial question as "happily,
a matter of but little practical importance" since the Supreme Court was
about to settle it "speedily and finally."
Two days later Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the Dred Scott
decision, asserting that Congress had no constitutional power to deprive
persons of their property rights in slaves in the territories. Southerners
were delighted, but the decision created a furor in the North.
Buchanan decided to end the troubles in Kansas by urging the admission
of the territory as a slave state. Although he directed
his Presidential authority to this goal, he further angered the Republicans
and alienated members of his own party. Kansas remained a territory.
When Republicans won a plurality in the House in 1858, every significant bill they
passed fell before southern votes in the Senate or a Presidential veto. The
Federal Government reached a stalemate.
Sectional strife rose to such a pitch in 1860 that the Democratic Party split into
northern and southern wings, each nominating its own candidate for the
Presidency. Consequently, when the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln, it
was a foregone conclusion that he would be elected even
though his name appeared on no southern ballot. Rather than accept a Republican
administration, the southern "fire-eaters" advocated secession.
President Buchanan, dismayed and hesitant, denied the legal right of
states to secede but held that the Federal Government legally could not prevent them.
He hoped for compromise, but secessionist leaders did not want compromise.
Then Buchanan took a more militant tack. As several Cabinet members resigned,
he appointed northerners, and sent the Star of the West to carry
reinforcements to Fort Sumter. On January 9, 1861, the vessel was far away.
Buchanan reverted to a policy of inactivity that continued until he left office. In March
1861 he retired to his Pennsylvania home Wheatland--where he died seven
years later--leaving his successor to resolve the frightful issue facing the Nation.