James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War

Introduction: Bum Rap or Bad Leadership?

Introduction Bum Rap or Bad Leadership? The nation’s fifteenth president—voted into office as the candidate most likely to keep the nation prosperous and peaceful—departed the White House in March 1861 with a broken union and the nation on the brink of civil war. Not good for one’s reputation. With a few notable exceptions, among them biographers George Ticknor Curtis and Philip S. Klein, scholars have been critical of Buchanan, consistently consigning him to the basement in virtually every presidential performance poll.1 In the view of many historians, among them Henry Steele Commager and James McPherson,Buchanan was the nation’s worst president,and not simply because he failed to stifle secessionist movements in the winter of 1860–61.2 Buchanan’s cabinet appointments (particularly the Southern ones who aligned with the Confederacy before his term’s expiration), his self-defeating patronage policies, his ethically dubious intervention in the shaping of the Dred Scott decision, his stubborn and politically disastrous Kansas policy that exacerbated sectional tensions, his rants against abolitionists—all these defects, considered alongside his response to secession, have imprinted Buchanan in common memory as a loser in the White House. Buchanan, of course, did not see things that way. Like two twentiethcentury presidents whom historians have found wanting, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, Buchanan made no apologies about his presidential performance. In his correspondence with associates and then in a memoir published after the Civil War, Buchanan pronounced himself well satisfied with the state of the country during his presidency, save for the final days when Southern fire-eaters refused to listen to reason.3 In Buchanan’s telling, he had done what he set out to accomplish. Although he failed to 2 · James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War prevent seven states from seceding, a matter of deep regret, he had handed over the keys to the White House to Abraham Lincoln with the nation still at peace. Aside from casting blame on others, Buchanan, to his death in 1868,remained supremely unreflective about the ways that his turbulent presidency had gone wrong. Buchanan’s positive assessment of his presidency has not weathered well.This volume does not aim to transform him into an underappreciated hero. Yet anyone seriously studying a period as complex as the four years preceding the Civil War will recognize that contending interpretations of characters and events often prove to be the rule. History is not about simplicity , but rather, as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich once observed, about“depth and complexity.”4 Certainly the years of Buchanan’s presidency exemplify that dictum, in the range of leading political figures in Washington and the respective states, the fluidity of political alignments, and the impact of unanticipated events, among them the John Brown raid. Few Americans in 1857 could envision a bloody civil war. But the sectional tensions already rife when Buchanan took office became, over time, unmanageable, in part because of the fifteenth president’s policymaking. In terms of political and governmental experience, Buchanan came into office better prepared, on paper, than any chief executive since John Quincy Adams.5 A state legislator, congressman, senator, diplomat, secretary of state, a perennial candidate for president who also declined a U.S. Supreme Court appointment, and a master of Pennsylvania’s labyrinthine politics, Buchanan served presidents from Jackson through Pierce with shrewdness and competence, if not brilliance. His political nickname,“The Old Public Functionary,” suggested his durability as a public figure as well as the contempt that some people held for him and his lack of imagination .6 Recognized as a conservative within his party, in 1856 Buchanan became the Democratic Party’s most available man, largely because he had been serving abroad as minister to England while other Democrats’entanglement with the explosive Kansas-Nebraska legislation diminished their national appeal. Running against Republican John Charles Frémont and the American Party’s Millard Fillmore, Buchanan became the nation’s best hope for sustaining prosperity while keeping a lid on sectional animosity. With a national government dominated by his party, Buchanan launched his presidency with these objectives seemingly within reach. Figure I.1. A Serviceable Garment—or Reverie of a Bachelor. New York: N. Currier, 1856. Lithograph. The cartoon depicts James Buchanan as a calculating aspirant for the presidency—one willing to embrace positions that will benefit him politically. The quotation reads:“My Old coat was a very fashionable...