Presidential Leadership, Suffrage Qualifications, and Kansas: 1857

PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP, SUFFRAGE QUALIFICATIONS, AND KANSAS: 1857 David E. Meerse In his magisterial study The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, David Potter wrote, "more than a century of historical writinghas stamped the administration of James Buchanan as a failure." And in his analysis of Presidential Greatness, Thomas A. Bailey has noted that "the threadbare adjectives scattered through the textbooks are 'weak,' 'feeble,' 'timid,' 'indecisive,' 'vacillating,' 'senile,' 'time-serving,' 'legalistic,' 'proSouthern ,' and 'traitorous.' " Although drawn from the Fort Sumter crisis, Bailey's adjectives and Potter's comment are equally applicable to the Buchanan administration's policies concerning impending Kansas statehood and subsequent presidential support for Kansas' admission to the Union under the notorious, pro-slavery Lecompton constitution. As Don E. Fehrenbacher, who completed Potter's study, concluded, "it may be that the most important single decision of the 1850's was Buchanan's decision to endorse the work of the Lecompton convention ."1 Policies leading to a decision of that magnitude certainly deserve the thorough historical scrutiny they have received. Yet in spite of the general uniform conclusion of presidential failure, no agreed-upon historical explanation of Kansas events has emerged. Instead, essentially two versions of Administration Kansas policy and the President's role therein have developed. Assessments of Buchanan's leadership failure began even before his presidential term ran its course. Testifying before a congressional investigating committee in 1860, Robert J. Walker, Buchanan's first Kansas territorial governor, made public a private letter from Buchanan dated July 12, 1857. This letter, Walker asserted, proved that Administration policy concerning the proper method of submitting the slavery issue to territorial voters had been changed. But, Walker also asserted, it 1 David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York, 1976) (Completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher), 297; Thomas A. Bailey, Presidential Greatness: The Image and the Man from George Washington to the Present (New York, 1966), 288; Fehrenbacher, comment on "Why the Republican Party Came to Power," in George H. Knoles (ed.), The Crisis of the Union, 1860-1861 (Baton Rouge, 1965), 29. 293 294civil war history was not Buchanan who had decided the change in policy. When queried as to whether the policy change had taken place with Buchanan's "knowledge and assent," Walker replied with a declaration of presidential impotence surpassing even Bailey's adjectives: "It is due to frankness and candor to say that I do not think he knew anything about it. . . ." The supposed heart of the presidential letter, as well as of the policy which was subsequently modified without Buchanan's consent, was the following paragraph: On the question of submitting the constitution to the bona fide resident settlers of Kansas I am willing to stand or fall. In sustaining such a principle we cannot fall. It is the principle of the Kansas-Nebraska bill; the principle of popular sovereignty, and the principle at the foundation of all popular government. The more it is discussed the stronger it will become. Should the convention of Kansas adopt the principle all will be settled harmoniously, and with the blessing of Providence, you will return triumphantly from your arduous, important, and responsible mission.2 This paragraph, andWalker's testimony, form thekey elements in one highly dramatic version of Kansas events, a "melodrama," developed most fully in thewriting ofAllan Nevins and his followers. Submission of a constitution for popular ratification was the initial Administration policy, these historians assert, and they point to the following sentence in Walker's letter of acceptance as evidence: "I understand that you and all your cabinet cordially concur in the opinion expressed by me, that the actual bona fide residents of the territory ... by a fair and regular vote, unaffected by fraud or violence, must be permitted, in adopting their state constitution, to decide for themselves what shall be their social institutions." This policy was officially endorsed in Walker's State Department instructions which asserted that "the institutions of Kansas should be established by the votes of the people of Kansas, unawed and uninterrupted by force or fraud. . . . When such a constitution shall be submitted to the people of the territory, they must be protected in the exercise of their right ofvoting for or against that...