James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War

9. A Conversation with William W. Freehling and Michael F. Holt, September 19, 2008

9 A Conversation with William W. Freehling and Michael F. Holt, September 19, 2008 moderated By John W. QUist John W. QUist: Tonight we are pleased to have with us two of the most distinguished and influential historians of the Civil War era: William W. Freehling and Michael F. Holt. After Professors Freehling and Holt make a few introductory remarks, in which they will offer some reflections on the 1850s from the perspective of a lifetime of study, we will discuss the Buchanan years, sectionalism and secession, and then open the floor for your questions. William W. FreehlinG: When I entered this field in the early 1960s, younger and older historians tended to clash over whether the Civil War was repressible. Most of the older scholars urged that blundering politicians caused a needless war,with no fundamental issue—and certainly not slavery—irrevocably dividing two largely similar sections. I joined most of the younger scholars in countering that fundamental differences,especially over slavery, generated an inescapable war. Forty years later, we have prevailed. I relish our triumph. But we won too total a victory. Erasing everything except slavery’s inexorable pressures removes too many provoking supplementary issues, too many accidents that helped stir up controversy—and yes, too many blundering politicians who helped wrench slavery issues into explosive shape.Witness James Buchanan ’s presidency, where a small dash of presidential bungling and of accidental occurrences must supplement a large dose of remorseless slavery issues, to understand a nation on the brink. Historians learn from observing the present as well as from studying the past. Contemporary events helped alert me to the impact of accidents 238 · Moderated by John W. Quist and blunders in Buchanan’s era.I came to political consciousness during an era of assassinations.Assailants murdered John F.Kennedy,Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. Assassins also wounded George Wallace and Ronald Reagan, but not fatally. Our politics might have been different if the two Kennedys and King had survived and if Wallace and Reagan had perished. And coincidental circumstances, not grand impersonal forces, determined which assassins killed which leaders. As I interpret my times, blundering statesmen no less than accidents affected events. Some may disagree with me that in the last eight years bungling politicians have harmed our foreign policy. [audience laughter] But no one will disagree that Richard Nixon’s Watergate floundering poisoned his presidency. Blunders and accidents during the years of Buchanan’s administration had similar disruptive consequences. To take the indisputable example of an accident’s partial impact, in 1859, New England’s John Brown seized the federal arsenal in western Virginia’s Harpers Ferry, seeking to increase slave resistance. One of white Virginians’ U.S. Marine rescuers, Israel Green, came at John Brown with what happened to be a dull dress sword. Green’s only potentially killing slash from his dulled blade happened to hit John Brown in the belt buckle. So the captured raider lived. The accidental survival magnified Brown’s impact. The survivor provocatively addressed his judges, bragging about an intervention on the side of the poor and helpless which all right-thinking men should applaud.The brilliant speech, not the inept raid, aroused some Northern intellectuals to broadcast damning indictments of Southern sinners. Southerners responded with furious indictments of Yankee saints. Without those postaddress castigations, President James Buchanan would have faced a less convulsed nation. And sectional antagonism had the opportunity to swell into its post-address distended form because a dulled sword happened to hit a belt buckle. Buchanan’s blunders, even more than coincidences beyond his control, escalated sectional warfare. No one will be surprised that yet another historian accuses poor Buchanan of mismanagement. The surprise here will be my argument that the Pennsylvanian usually erred not by passively allowing events to overwhelm him but by counterproductively throwing himself into the breech. A Conversation with William W. Freehling and Michael F. Holt · 239 True, Buchanan’s Kansas disaster sustains the conventional image of this president’s unfortunate inertia.At the moment of decision on Kansas’s admission into the Union, Buchanan did fall fatally silent about the key issue: whether Kansas’s voters had to approve their entire constitution,and especially its legalization or abolition of slavery. Members of his administration attended Kansas’s so-called Lecompton convention. They bore no presidential insistence that the convention’s entire constitution for the proposed new state must be...