By Edwin Cooney
Unfortunately for the people of his time, James Buchanan was elected the fifteenth president of the United States. He was born on Saturday, April 23rd, 1791 (exactly 221 years ago today) in a log cabin in Cove Gap, a few miles from Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. Although as a college student at Dickinson College he had a reputation for mischief making, he wasn’t in the least what we’d today call delinquent.
Although some years later his wealthy fiancé Anne Coleman broke off their engagement and then, perhaps committed suicide suspecting that young Buchanan merely wanted her for her money, most everyone who knew and wrote or spoke of him testified to Buchanan’s fidelity, dignity and decency. (Right after breaking off her engagement to Buchanan, Miss Coleman visited relatives in Philadelphia over the 1819 holiday season. While there, she took an overdose of laudanum, a “fashionable” remedy ladies of that time used, when distraught or in pain, to sleep. No one knows whether she deliberately committed suicide or whether in her distress, she took a little extra laudanum to induce sleep).
On another matter of the heart, there are persistent reports from his days in Washington that James Buchanan was gay. His partner or “wife” was supposedly William Rufus De Vane King—a remarkable man—of Alabama, who was elected vice president under Franklin Pierce in 1852 but died shortly after taking the vice presidential oath in Havana, Cuba, where he was struggling to recover from tuberculosis. He returned to Alabama, but died there on April 18th, 1853 before assuming his vice presidential duties.
Many scholars, as well as some of us who aren’t scholars, rate James Buchanan the very worst of all our presidents. Part, but only part of the reason for this judgment is that he should have been so well prepared, by experience, to be an excellent president. By the time of his 1856 election he’d been in politics for the better part of forty-two years. He’d served as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in the 1820s, as Minister to Russia 1832-1833, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1830s and early 40s, Secretary of State under President James K. Polk from 1845 to 1849 and as Minister to Great Britain 1853 to 1856. Politically a northern Jacksonian Democrat who sympathized with the socio/political principles of the South, James Buchanan personally disapproved of slavery. According to his biographer, George Ticknor Curtis, Buchanan, throughout his stay in Washington, often purchased slaves and then freed them in his native Pennsylvania without the least expectation of reimbursement.
His administration, the duration of which was March 4th, 1857 to March 4th, 1861, was marked by increasing tension between the North and the South. Fearing southern threats of secession from the very outset of his term, President Buchanan pled for, rather than acted for, preservation of the Union. Secure in the knowledge from the moment he was sworn into office that the slavery issue was settled (many believe that he’d been privately assured that the Supreme Court was about to rule in the infamous Dred Scott decision that Congress could not restrict slavery). The new president sided with the demands of the South in all matters throughout his presidency.
In 1858, although the people of Kansas twice rejected the Lecompton pro slavery state constitution, Buchanan sought to get Kansas admitted as a slave state. His long friendship with Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s opponent in that fall’s Illinois senatorial election, came to a bitter end when Douglas used his power, as Senate Territories Committee chairman, to defeat the South’s and Buchanan’s bill in Congress to admit Kansas as a slave state.
Then, there was the case of the 1857 financial panic when thousands of businesses failed in the wake of the collapse of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company. The economy in the Northeast, Midwest and West deteriorated while the South’s cotton economy prospered due to Europe’s need for “king cotton.” President Buchanan, partly for political/ideological reasons, but many were sure out of personal/prejudicial sentiment, refused to intervene.
Had President Buchanan taken political command, for example, by establishing an emergency committee made up of northern and southern moderates sufficiently well connected with opinion makers in their home states, insisting that they establish a set of strategies for political and economic compromise before passions got out of hand, perhaps civil war could have been prevented or localized to the deep South. If he’d been far sighted enough to offer a program for gradual slave emancipation consisting of compensation, as Lincoln actively sought to do in 1862, much of the tragedy may well have been abated. Paralyzed by fear of secession, he was able to do nothing.
Thus, when the crunch came in the wake of Lincoln’s November 6th, 1860 election and the South, led by South Carolina on December 20th, began seceding, Buchanan was helpless to do anything effective to prevent it. Informed, while attending a Washington ball, by a happy South Carolina messenger proclaiming that he felt like a little boy just let out of school, the President, ashen faced with tears welling up in his eyes, could only desperately call for a carriage to take him back to the executive mansion.
President Buchanan believed that he had the authority to protect federal property in the South, but lacked the constitutional authority to prevent the South from seceding even though he regarded secession as illegal. He even, despite advice from Secretary of State Jeremiah S. Black and Attorney General Edwin M. Stanton, failed to adequately supply the federal garrison at Fort Sumter located in Charleston harbor.
James Buchanan, ultimately, was more a man of law than a man of men. If the Constitution permitted an act, it was wise. If it didn’t, whether an action was moral or immoral seemed to make little difference. Law, Buchanan believed, must govern passion. Firm in that conclusion, for the remaining years of his life Buchanan never wavered in his belief that he’d done all he legally could do to prevent the Civil War, and if all he could do was what was legal, it was, by definition, enough. (Buchanan would live through the Civil War and support the cause of the Union. He would die on June 1st, 1868 at Wheatland, his estate near Lancaster, Pennsylvania.)
Basically, President Buchanan was a man of unquestionable morality. All his life he went out of his way to prevent even the slightest possibility of dishonesty or the appearance of a conflict of interests in his public duties. However, he clearly had a blind spot when it came to comprehending matters of passion or of the connection linking human cause and effect. When the law and his sense of passion or compassion ran together, he could purchase slaves in Washington and free them in Pennsylvania. Neither his political, religious, nor personal experiences with the giant personalities of his time such as John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster or members of his cabinet enabled his gifted mind to go beyond its capacity for legal comprehension.
Nearly forty years ago when Richard Nixon was driven from office in the wake of the legal and political reaction to the Watergate affair, millions of Americans were grateful that we are “a government of laws and not of men.” In the case of President Buchanan, we have the reverse. James Buchanan failed because he was unable to see beyond the law and the Constitution.
His failure as president came about because he allowed his logical mind to dominate his humane principles. To him, there’s little doubt, that logic and principle were the same thing. Hence, the story of James Buchanan, as I see it, is the sad but true story of the worst presidency we’ve ever had and hopefully ever will have!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY