Before the Rhetorical Presidency

James Buchanan: Romancing the Union

James Buchanan: Romancing the Union robert฀e.฀terrill James Buchanan is widely recognized as one of our worst presidents. Indeed, he is ranked at the very bottom in a 1994 survey sponsored by the Siena Research Institute, a 1997 study by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a survey of historians that accompanied C-SPAN’s 1999 series American Presidents : Life Portraits, an accompanying survey of C-SPAN viewers, and an October 2000 survey of seventy-eight scholars of history, political science, and law, cosponsored by the Federalist Society and the Wall Street Journal.1 In their 1997 book, Rating the Presidents, William J. Ridings Jr. and Stuart B. McIver elevate Buchanan to forty, out of forty-one, just ahead of Harding , but also note that “Buchanan is one of the most maligned of all the presidents.”2 Charles and Richard Faber, in their The American Presidents Ranked by Performance, published in 2000, give Buchanan the highest marks I was able to find, setting him at number twenty-five, based primarily on his three-way tie for third with George Washington and Harry Truman in the area of foreign relations.3 These survey results are reinforced by the opinions of scholars. Michael J. Birkner, for example, opens his introduction to an edited volume called James Buchanan and the Political Crisis of the 1850s, by noting that “Buchanan is perhaps best remembered, or misremembered, as the weak-kneed, dough-faced president who allowed the South to break up the Union.” A few pages later, he suggests that while “it is extreme to call Buchanan . . . romancing฀the฀union:฀james฀buchanan  American’s worst president, it is true that little went right and much went wrong for President Buchanan, and that many of his troubles he brought on himself.” And among those troubles, apparently, was the fact that, as Birkner puts it, “Politically speaking, Buchanan’s presidency was a disaster.”4 William E. Gienapp notes that “Few presidents have left office with less influence over their party than Buchanan. By his retirement he was truly a man without a party, rejected by virtually everyone and without prestige or influence.”5 Robert E. May reflects that “When it comes to ratings of American chief executives, President James Buchanan occupies a lowly rank.” May acknowledges that “there are dissenting voices such as that of biographer Philip Shriver Klein,” but that “historians long ago reached a consensus that Pennsylvania’s only president did his country a terrible disservice by promoting policies that aggravated the sectional crisis of the 1850s.”6 Allan Nevins notes that “No President ever faced a more difficult task” than did James Buchanan—and also that “None . . . ever faced a terrible crisis with feebler means of dealing with it effectively.”7 Of course, no small part of Buchanan’s troubles stem from the fact that it was his unfortunate fate to preside over national disintegration. It would be a remarkably strong character indeed who could snatch a glowing legacy from the jaws of such an epic disaster. Some (like Allan Nevins) think that Buchanan contributed to the onset of the Civil War; others (like Klein, his most sympathetic biographer) think that Buchanan might actually have helped to delay it. John Updike, who has taken James Buchanan as the subject of one full-length play (as far as I know, never produced) and one novel (actually not about James Buchanan, but about a guy who is trying to write a book about James Buchanan while having an affair with his neighbor’s wife), gives him perhaps the fairest assessment: “Elected amid rising sectionalism to keep the peace for four more years, he performed the job for which he was hired.”8 Probably all of these assessments are partly correct; they are not mutually exclusive, at any rate. It is not my main purpose in this essay to contribute directly to this debate , but rather to suggest that Buchanan’s particular failures as a president were a function of his rhetoric. I begin by reviewing some of the historical assessments of Buchanan’s presidential oratory. I then suggest a modification of Jeffrey K. Tulis’s conception of “rhetoric” to allow a more nuanced assessment of Buchanan’s discourse. Specifically, I suggest that Buchanan romanced the Union, placing it upon an unapproachable pedestal and thus rendering it impervious to rhetorical engagement. In doing so, Buchanan both failed to intervene in the escalating sectional conflict and failed to supply his auditors [18.191.5.239] Project MUSE (2024-04...