James Buchanan

James Buchanan: The Ablest Man Who Failed

Two days after he swore the oath of office in March 1857, the Supreme Court handed down *Dred Scott*. The new president had been sympathetic to the Southern position and, the Miller Center records, had influenced the decision. He believed it would settle the slavery question for good. Within four years seven states had left the Union and James Buchanan had gone home to Lancaster, having handed the wreckage to Abraham Lincoln.

A Log Cabin and a Fortune by Thirty

Buchanan was born on 23 April 1791 in a log cabin near Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, the second child and eldest son of eleven. His father was an Irish immigrant who prospered as a merchant; his mother, Elizabeth Speer, joined him in insisting on education. After the local Mercersburg schools he entered Dickinson College at sixteen, where he was "a spirited presence on campus" and "managed to avoid two near expulsions from the school over disciplinary matters." He graduated with honours in two years.

Admitted to the Pennsylvania bar in 1813, he built a Lancaster practice of remarkable profitability. By the Miller Center's account, "before he became thirty, he was worth over $250,000 — a sizable fortune in 1819." Few American politicians have arrived in public life with so much competence already proven.

The Fiancée

In about 1819 Buchanan became engaged to Ann Coleman, daughter of a wealthy iron trader. Her family disapproved of the match. Gossip reached her that he had been unfaithful; she broke the engagement and died shortly afterwards, and the Colemans refused to let him attend her funeral. He vowed never to marry another woman and never did — the only bachelor to occupy the presidency. The episode is the one crack of private feeling in an otherwise sealed public life.

Forty Years of Office

The résumé he assembled over the following four decades is among the fullest any president has brought to the job. He sat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives from 1814 to 1819 as a Federalist, in the United States House from 1821 to 1831, went out as minister to Russia in 1832 and returned in 1833, entered the United States Senate that year, served as Secretary of State under James K. Polk, and was minister to England under Franklin Pierce.

His positions on slavery were settled early and never moved. He disliked slavery personally, regarded abolitionists as dangerous troublemakers, and held that the Constitution protected the Southern states' right to keep the institution. In London he attached his name to the Ostend Manifesto, the scheme to acquire Cuba and extend slave territory, which "enraged antislavery forces" and made him a favourite in the South, where he was known as "Old Buck."

He wanted the presidency badly. He failed to get the nomination in 1844 and was blocked by Stephen Douglas at the 1852 Democratic convention after thirty-four ballots. By 1856, aged sixty-five, he knew it was his last chance, and he took it, winning on a platform that left slavery to the states.

Two Days After the Oath

He took office on 4 March 1857. Two days later the Supreme Court ruled that Black Americans, enslaved or free, held no citizenship rights, and struck down the Missouri Compromise. Buchanan had leaned on the outcome and welcomed it as a final settlement. It was the opposite. The decision, as the National Constitution Center observes, "angered and solidified Buchanan's Republican opponents, and it drove a wedge into the Democratic Party."

Kansas, and the Breaking of a Party

The wedge went in further over Kansas. Buchanan endorsed the proslavery constitution drawn up there; Stephen Douglas insisted on a genuine popular vote instead. The rupture between president and senator, the Miller Center notes, "divided the Democratic Party and weakened Buchanan." In 1859 John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, intended to raise a slave insurrection, deepened the sectional split even after Brown was captured and hanged. By 1860 the Democratic Party had come apart under the pressure, and Abraham Lincoln won the presidency.

Seven States, and a President Who Would Not Move

South Carolina seceded six weeks after Lincoln's election. Six more states followed within another six weeks. Buchanan held that secession was unconstitutional and simultaneously that he had no power to prevent it. "It is beyond the power of any president," he told Congress, "to restore peace and harmony among the states." He had already framed the Southern case in the South's own words: "All for which the slave States have ever contended, is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way."

He left office in March 1861 with the Union broken and the crisis untouched, vanished from public life, and died in 1868.

Why James Is Called a Genius

Buchanan is the hardest case on this list, because the raw ability is not in doubt and the failure is total. William Cooper, professor emeritus of history at Louisiana State University, states the abilities plainly: Buchanan "possessed considerable talents — he was skilled politically, honest, legally able, and capable of managing coalitions." The record supports every clause. He was a first-rate lawyer who made a great fortune before thirty. He served in both houses of Congress, ran two foreign missions and the State Department, and knew the machinery of American government as well as anyone alive. He was, on paper, the best-prepared man ever elected to the office.

And it did not matter. Cooper's verdict is the standard one: Buchanan's passivity on slavery was "a prime contributing factor in the coming of the Civil War," and "by refusing to take a firm stand on either side of the slavery issue, Buchanan failed to resolve the question, leaving his nation's gravest crisis to his successor." Nor was he neutral in the way he claimed. Cooper is direct: "He openly despised abolitionists. Southerners were his political and social friends, and when forced to take sides in one of the endless slavery battles, he typically sided with Southern interests." He is regularly ranked the worst president in American history, and the reason is not stupidity but a legalistic cast of mind that mistook constitutional propriety for statesmanship — the conviction that a court ruling could dissolve a moral crisis, and that a president facing the destruction of the Union had no authority to act. Cooper's closing line is the fairest epitaph available: "In a different time, he might have been a successful President, but he was no match for the forces that tore at the country in the late 1850s."

Legacy

Buchanan's name survives as a byword for the failure of experience without judgement. The intelligence was real, the industry was real, the honesty is conceded even by his harshest critics; what he lacked was the willingness to choose. He handed Lincoln a country already dismembered, and the National Constitution Center's summary of his reputation is unsparing: it was his "apparent indifference to the onset of the Civil War" that defined the presidency. Buchanan remains the standing case study in what a capable man can fail to do.

Achievements

• President of the United States (1857–1861)
• United States representative (1821–1823)
• member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives (1814–1816)
• United States ambassador to the Russian Empire (1832–1833)
• Educated at Dickinson College