James Buchanan and the Political Crisis of the 1850s (review)

BOOK REVIEWS67 October 3-4. The smaller battle at Davis's Bridge on October 5 ended the campaign , which was a Confederate disaster. Price and Van Dorn failed to win any strategic gains to justify their heavy casualties, and the result contributed to Bragg's inability to hold the ground he had gained in Kentucky. By November, all Confederate offensives in theWest had been repulsed, and the Federals were on their way to Vicksburg. Hardly any major figure comes out well in Cozzens's view. Van Dorn was foolishly aggressive, Price was a poor tactician, and Maj. Gen. Mansfield Lovell failed to capitalize on the Confederates' most promising opportunity to capture Corinth when he refused to press home his assault againstthe beleagured Federals on the evening of October 3. Even the Federal victors are subjects of criticism. Cozzens's negative view of Grant should be tempered with a little more objectivity , while Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans deserves most of the author's ire. Cozzens accurately notes the supreme irony of these campaigns. Price and Van Dorn were trying to accomplish a great deal against enormous odds; even if they had captured Corinth from Rosecrans's force, which was equal to their own, they could not have held it in the face of Grant's reinforcements. There were very few good options for the harried Rebels in Mississippi that summer. A big hole in the historiography of the western campaigns has been filled, and we look forward to more work from Cozzens's pen. Earl J. Hess Lincoln Memorial University James Buchanan and the Political Crisis of the 1850s. Edited by Michael J. Birkner. (Selinsgrove, Pa.: SusquehannaUniversity Press, 1996. Pp. 215. $29.50.) Long considered an unqualified failure as America's fifteenth president, James Buchanan has often been characterized as a man overshadowed by his time. With the exception of the late Philip Klein, historians have reduced the quiet Pennsylvanian to a Nero-like stereotype as the man who fiddled while the Union collapsed around him. Recognizing that Buchanan, however flawed, deserved more balanced consideration, a distinguished panel of historians convened at Gettysburg College in September 1991 to reassess his beleaguered presidency and the turbulent 1850s. From that conference comes this slim but insightful volume of essays. Michael Holt's analysis of the election of 1856 stresses a different perspective of that contest. Rather than rehashing the fight between the Democrats and the emerging Republican party, Holt focuses instead on the fusion candidacy of Millard Fillmore, the campaign's clear loser. The essay presents Fillmore's candidacy as an attempt to fashion a Union party and argues that Fillmore and his backers believed they were targeting the political center rather than the fringes ofthe political spectrum. However, that center no longer existed. Their inability to understand that meant that Fillmore never posed a credible threat to Buchanan's election. 68CIVIL WAR HISTORY Mark Summers examines Buchanan's relationship with Democratic newspapers , traditionally a powerful tool in the hands of the party's leaders. As the very nature ofnews gathering and reporting changed, the press became increasingly independent. This newfound independence, which Buchanan unwittingly encouraged, made the president look weaker than his predecessors to both contemporaries and historians, thus contributing to his diminished reputation. William Gienapp compares Buchanan to Abraham Lincoln, his immediate successor. In a predictable but interesting piece, he finds Lincoln, despite his arguably inferior qualifications, a superior leader. Labeling Buchanan a "political anachronism" (120), he echoes a familiar theme running through most of the essays: the changing political climate required a new outlook which was clearly beyond Buchanan's abilities. The tried and true precepts of the Second Party System no longer resonated with the American public. This point is explored in greater depth and nicely tied together by Peter Knupfer, whose essay on the election of 1 860 succinctly defines the changing political paradigm that made Buchanan one of its most prominent casualties. Foreign policy in LatinAmerica emerges as one ofthe few bright spots of the Buchanan administration. In a persuasively documented essay, Robert May challenges the traditional perception of Buchanan as a lackey of Southern expansionists , portraying him instead as a staunch foe of illicit filibustering...