Buchanan, Corruption and the Election of 1860

BUCHANAN, CORRUPTION AND THE ELECTION OF I860 David E. Meerse When James Buchanan delivered his inaugural address, he included a solemn warning against political corruption, against those who would "calculate the mere material value of the Union. . . ." Next in importance to the maintenance of the Constitution and the Union is the duty of preserving the government free from the taint, or even the suspicion, of corruption. Public virtue is the vital spirit of republics; and history shows that when this has decayed, and the love of money has usurped its place, although the forms of free government may remain for a season, the substance has departed forever.1 As is so often the case in American politics, his very words were later turned against him. In December, 1859, when the Republican National Committee issued a call for delegates to the coming presidential nominating convention , the invitation was addressed to all who were opposed to "federal corruption and usurpation." The Peoples' Party state convention , meeting in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in February, 1860, stated that the elimination of Democratic corruption should be one of the party's primary aims. New Jersey Republicans proclaimed that Buchanan's administration was "corrupt beyond example and to a degree under which no nation can long exist. . . ." Missouri Republicans expressed similar sentiments.2 This was more than election year rhetoric: the Republican statements were based on a series of congressional investigations which suggested that the ideal of "preserving the government free from the taint, or even the suspicion, of corruption," was beyond the reach of the Democrats and James Buchanan. In the first session of the Thirty-Fifth Congress (December, 1857ijohn B. Moore (ed.), The Works of James Buchanan (Philadelphia, 19081911 ), X, 109-110. Hereafter cited as Buchanan, Works. 2 Proceedings of the First Three Republican National Conventions of 1856, I860, and 1864. . . . (Minneapolis, 1893), p. 83; C. Maxwell Myers, 'Influence of Western Pennsylvania in the Campaign of 1860," Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, XXIV (1941), 236; New York Daily Tribune, Mar. 9, 19, 1860. 116 June, 1858), a House committee, with a Democratic majority, revealed that the military reservation at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, had been sold at a private sale to a group of speculators which included Secretary of War John B. Floyd's personal banker and the brother of the collector of customs for the port of New York, a Buchanan appointee. Administration Democrats were able to protect the Secretary from a resolution of censure, but only by a majority of five votes, and the House later repealed all authority for the Secretary to sell military reservations.3 Another committee, headed by an antiLecompton Democrat, discovered that Floyd had purchased a piece of land in New York for the War Department from the same group of speculators at a price which even the Secretary admitted was "exorbitant."4 Democratic congressmen were further embarrassed by the necessity of electing a new doorkeeper for the House when it was revealed that the first doorkeeper had falsified his accounts.5 At the same time Democratic efforts to uncover Republican corruption in connection with a tariff bill in the preceding Congress came to nothing.6 Although few abuses were corrected, these investigations gave the Republicans a cause. The Democratic New York Herald predicted that in 1860 the slavery issue would be "out of the way" and the Republicans would campaign primarily against Democratic corruption. One Virginian wrote that congressional Democrats should acknowledge extravagance and corruption and initiate corrective acts so that the people would have "no motive to take the Government out of the hands of one set of reformers to place it in the hands of another."7 In the final session of the Thirty-Fifth Congress (December, 1858March , 1859), the Republicans attacked the President himself when certain events combined to heighten the pressure for congressional investigations of the executive. In a letter to the Fort Duquesne centennial committee, the President declared that if "the employment of money to carry elections" continued to infect "the voters and their Representatives in the State and National Legislatures" and thus 3 William Watts Folwell, "The Sale of Fort Snelling, 1857," Minnesota Historical Society Collections, XV (1909-1914), 393-403; House Report No. 351...