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3 261 8 President Buchanan, the Crittenden Compromise, President Lincoln, and Fort Sumter ge sixty-six at his election in 1856, James Buchanan was, in the words of Jean H. Baker, “almost as old as the United States, a point of pride throughout his life.” Few presidents in American history have drawn on such long and varied experience in Washington—certainly not his Republican successor, Abraham Lincoln, whose experience in national government encompassed but a single term in the lower house of Congress during the late 1840s. Yet Buchanan was deficient in the qualities of political shrewdness and capacity for personal growth that distinguished Lincoln. The Pennsylvania Democrat had repeatedly sought his party’s nomination for the presidency since 1844, when he helped derail former president Martin Van Buren’s attempt to win a third nomination after his failed reelection bid in 1840. Despite Buchanan’s courtly manners, fastidious dress, and rather distinguished appearance, concludes historian William Gienapp, the fifteenth president proved “plodding and unimaginative ” and “isolated himself from dissenting views.” At the same time, “Old Buck” impressed others as “a kind man, firmly religious, decent, and extraordinarily courteous.”1 In early 1857, as Buchanan prepared for his inauguration, he wrote to Virginia senator John Y. Mason, a fellow Democrat, that the new administration’s “great object” would be “to arrest, if possible, the agitation of the slavery question at the North and to destroy sectional parties.” In other words, he would seek to weaken the popularity of free-soilism in the North and the clamor of abolitionists against southern slavery and slaveholders. Yet the fires of northern antislavery continued to be fanned by high winds from what many knew as Bleeding Kansas and Bleeding Sumner. Buchanan paid the conventional if genuine tribute to dependence on God’s will by adding, “Should a kind Providence enable me to succeed in my efforts to restore harmony to the Union, I shall feel that I have not lived in vain.” Nonetheless, God’s favor did not shine on his efforts, which more often than not exacerbated the sectional tensions he intended to abate. Indeed, his first ten months in the White House, beginning with the Supreme Court’s announcement of its decision in the Dred Scott 262 Buchanan, Lincoln, and Fort Sumter case, “encompassed a political crisis which proved to be decisive in the coming of the Civil War,” Kenneth M. Stampp has concluded. In the spring of 1858, the Buchanan administration’s stubbornness and unsavory tactics contributed to “a crushing defeat” for southerners in Congress.The House, instead of approving a fraudulent as well as proslavery Lecompton Constitution, voted 120–112 for a substitute motion to resubmit the document to Kansas voters, who subsequently rejected it by a 6–1 ratio.2 Also in 1858, Buchanan vetoed a homestead bill giving 160 acres of public land in the West to each free settler five years after he occupied it. (During the previous session of Congress, a homestead bill had handily passed the House, but as president of the Senate, Vice President John C. Breckinridge broke a tie by voting against the measure .) Because the 1858 homestead measure received support from free state Democrats in the Midwest, Buchanan’s veto “played into the hands of the Republicans,” who had argued that the Slave Power would prevent passage of such a free-soil bill. As David M. Potter points out, southerners “recognized that no one could establish a plantation on 160 acres, but the lure of free land might attract immigrants who would add to the already great preponderance of the free-state population.”3 Buchanan’s sympathies for white southerners and his political “march of folly” did much to assure an 1860 presidential victory for the candidate of the same northern antislavery party that Buchanan’s Democracy had barely managed to defeat four years earlier. In early December 1860, the lame-duck House and Senate convened in Washington, remaining in session until the inauguration of Lincoln and Vice President Hannibal Hamlin on 4 March and grappling unsuccessfully with sectionalism and secession. On 3 December, Buchanan delivered his fourth and final annual message to both houses of Congress. The opening section made clear his proslavery brand of Unionism: “The long continued and intemperate interference of the northern people in the question of slavery in the southern States has at length produced its natural effects”—the formation of “sectional” and “hostile political parties.” Like most white southerners , Buchanan saw “the incessant and violent agitation...

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