James Buchanan was the 15th President of the United States. He took office at a time of sectional
hysteria over slavery. The nation was headed toward civil war and he could not avert it. When war came, after his administration,
Buchanan was a convenient scapegoat.
Before assuming the presidency, Buchanan had achieved a laudable record of 40 years of public service as a state assemblyman,
congressman, senator, minister to Russia, secretary of state and minister to Great Britain. As president, however, his many domestic and
foreign programs fell victim to the rising slavery controversy.
Buchanan personally opposed slavery, but as a public official he felt bound to sustain it where sanctioned by law. Political enemies called
him a "trimmer", but he took middle ground consistently as a matter of policy. What some considered impotent vacillation was an
expression of three fundamental convictions: (1) that only by compromise between the parts could a federal republic survive; (2) that
citizens had to obey the law even when they thought it unjust; and (3) that questions of morality could not be settled by political action.
Despite the secession movement, he succeded in preventing hostilities between North and South, and he turned over to Lincoln a
nation at peace with eight slave states still in the Union.
James Buchanan was born near Mercersburg, Pa., on April 23, 1791, the second of 11 children of James and Elizabeth Speer
Buchanan. His father, who had emigrated from County Donegal, Ireland, in 1783, owned a frontier trading post at Stony Batter, near
Mercersburg. Young James grew up there. From his father he learned sound business habits, and from his mother he acquired a strong
Presbyterian indoctrination, a love of scholarship, and a sense of patriotic ardor.
Buchanan attended Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., from which he graduated with honors in 1809. He studied law and was
admitted to the bar in Lancaster, Pa., in 1813. After brief service in the War of 1812, he was elected to the Pennsylvania assembly as a
Federalist. He served in the assembly from 1814 to 1816, while maintaining his legal practice.
In 1819, Buchanan became engaged to Ann Caroline Coleman, daughter of a wealthy ironmaster. Her family disapproved and gossip
spread the rumor of fortune hunting on Buchanan's part. A series of unhappy incidents led Ann to break the engagement, and a week
later she died, a possible suicide. The town held Buchanan responsible, but his friends, believing the Colemans to be at fault, rallied to
elect him to Congress in 1820. Buchanan never married and later became the only bachelor president. His niece Harriet Lane served
as mistress of the White House.
Buchanan served five terms in the House of Representatives, from 1821 to 1831. As chairman of the House Judiciary
Committee, he was prosecutor in the impeachment trial of federal Judge James H. Peck in 1831. He successfully fought a congressional
effort to repeal the 25th section of the Judiciary Act of 1789, thereby preserving the right of the U.S. Supreme Court to judge the
constitutionality of state laws and state court decisions.
In 1824, with the demise of the Federalist party, Buchanan supported Andrew Jackson for the presidency. Jackson, who
received the greatest number of popular votes, lost the election to John Quincy Adams when it was decided in the House of
Representatives. Charges of "bargain and sale" were raised against Adams and Henry Clay, who had been influential in Adams' election.
When Jackson, in 1827, accused Buchanan of complicity in this affair, Buchanan repelled the charge forcefully. This clash produced a
personal break between Buchanan and Jackson, but politically Buchanan remained a Jacksonian Democrat.
After Jackson's victory in 1828 a contest for patronage between the wings of the Democratic party, led, respectively, by Buchanan and
George M. Dallas, led Jackson to appoint Buchanan minister to Russia. At St. Petersburg from 1832 to 1834, Buchanan negotiated
the first commercial treaty between the two countries.
Upon his return in 1834, Buchanan was elected to the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania. He remained in the Senate until 1845, serving
as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Always seeking to keep clear the line between federal and state power, he resisted the
efforts of Daniel Webster to expand the range of national functions and those of John C. Calhoun to expand the domain of state
rights. Buchanan served as chairman of the committee to handle the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and in this
sensitive post he defeated a "gag rule" proposal that would have ended the receiving of abolitionist petitions in the Senate.
President James K. Polk named Buchanan secretary of state in 1845, when U.S. relations with Mexico and England had grown tense.
As secretary, Buchanan managed a settlement of the Oregon dispute at the 49th parallel after serious differences with Polk, who had
risked war with England by demanding all of Oregon. He unsuccessfully sought peaceful settlement with Mexico, and the Mexican War
was fought during his tenure in office. After the election of Zachary Taylor in 1848, Buchanan retired to Wheatland, his country estate
near Lancaster, to plan his campaign for the 1852 presidential contest.
A collision between forces supporting Buchanan and Sen. Stephen A. Douglas in 1852 gave the Democratic nomination and, ultimately,
the election victory to a compromise candidate, Franklin Pierce . In 1853, Pierce appointed Buchanan minister to Great Britain. Buchanan
worked to iron out problems that had arisen over the Clayton - Bulwer Treaty and later calmed the serious trouble that arose from the
dismissal of the British minister to Washington.
Buchanan also became involved in the controversial Ostend Manifesto of 1854. He and other American ministers in Europe met at
Ostend, Belgium, under instructions from President Pierce "to detach" Cuba from Spain. Buchanan urged private dealings with
European bankers who wished the sale of Cuba, and the dispatch prepared by the ministers was mainly a statement of his plan to deal
with financiers. However, it concluded with a softened version of Pierce's instructions - that the United States might seize Cuba - and
Buchanan signed the manifesto under protest. News of the document created a public uproar in the United States, and Congress called
for papers on the subject. Pierce, however, withheld his instructions and permitted the public to believe that the ministers had framed the
manifesto independently. Buchanan complained to his chief, "Never did I obey instructions so reluctantly". But it was not until a century
later that historians discovered the presidential instructions.
The conservative Democrats nominated Buchanan for president in 1856 to run against Republican John C. Fremont and Whig
Millard Fillmore . As many of Fremont's violently antislavery supporters were calling for Northern withdrawal from a union with
slaveholders, Buchanan ran on a "Save the Union" theme. He received 1,838,169 popular votes and 174 electoral votes to
Fremont's total of 1,341,264 and 114. After his election, Buchanan wrote: "The great object of my administration will be to arrest...the
agitation of the slavery question at the North and to destroy sectional parties." He excluded sectional extremists from his cabinet,
choosing instead conservative and nationalist politicians.
The Kansas crisis became his first test. Two governments existed there, the proslavery Lecompton organization, legalized by Pierce, and
the outlawed antislavery Topeka faction. The Kansas - Nebraska Act of 1854 had provided that Kansas should vote for or against
slavery at the time of adopting a state constitution. Buchanan chose an antislavery governor for Kansas Territory, Robert J. Walker ,
instructing him to administer the constitution-making elections with strict impartiality. All Kansas had full opportunity to register, but the
antislavery people refused, thereby forfeiting their right to vote. A proslavery convention then presented the question of slavery to the
electorate, as the law required, and the proslavery faction won. Buchanan, who wanted Kansas admitted as a free state, was confronted
with the Lecompton constitution , adopted according to the law but violently condemned by the majority of the Kansas electorate - the
antislavery people who refused to register.
The President, unwilling to override the work of a legitimate constitutional convention or to cancel a local election result, asked Congress
to approve the Lecompton constitution, make Kansas momentarily a slave state, and thus enable the people there to make any new
constitution they wished. But Douglas, outraged by such an outcome of his popular sovereignty scheme, broke with Buchanan and joined
with the Republicans to defeat the admission of Kansas.
Striving to save the situation, Buchanan agreed to the English bill , named for William English , the congressman who devised it. This
measure provided that Kansas could be admitted as a slave state, but with a much reduced federal land grant; it implied that if Kansas
remained a territory for a few years the usual land grant would be increased. The bill passed and provided a cooling-off period. Holding
out for more land, Kansas rejected the Lecompton constitution. Ultimately the English bill brought Buchanan what he had desired: the
admission of Kansas as a free state, over his signature, in 1861.
The Republican and pro-Douglas press claimed, erroneously, that the English bill offered a bribe of land to make Kansans accept the
Lecompton constitution, whereas the fact was exactely the opposite: the Kansans had to reject the proslavery constitution to get the land.
Many textbooks still speak of the English bill as a Southern swindle manufactured by Buchanan.
The Lecompton issue weakened the administration. Following the elections of 1858, Congress fell under the control of the Republicans
and the Douglas Democrats, who often combined to thwart important presidential programs such as the purchases of Cuba and Alaska.
John Brown 's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, in collusion with Republican leaders, convinced Southerners that the Republicans actually
planned their death.
Buchanan was not a candidate for reelection in 1860, but supported his Vice President John C. Breckinridge . At the Democratic
convention the party split, the Southern Democrats nominated Breckinridge, and the Northern Democrats named Douglas. With the
Democrats thus divided, the Republicans elected their candidate, Lincoln.
Lincoln's success triggered the secession of South Carolina on Dec. 20, 1860. Buchanan, now in the difficult position of being a lame
duck president, hoped to isolate secession there. He urged Lincoln to join him in a call for a constitutional convention in order to gain time
and to place the crisis before a body more responsible than Congress. When Lincoln rejected this proposal, Southern members of
Buchanan's cabinet resigned, and the seven Deep South states formed the Confederacy on Feb. 4, 1861.
Buchanan remade his cabinet of strong Union men, most of whom later served in Lincoln's administration. He offered to Congress a 4-
point program proposing (1) the appointment of a collector to enforce federal tariff laws in Charleston, S.C.; (2) increases in the Army
and Navy; (3) a constitutional convention; and (4) a pledge to take no action likely to provoke war. Congress refused to act. Republican
legislators blocked the President's plans, believing that their party would gain credit for settling the crisis after the change of administration
on March 4. However, Buchanan did succeed in retaining 8 of the 15 slave states in the Union and in finishing his term without bloodshed.
Lincoln, in his inaugural, presented basically the same program. However, Lincoln pursued a policy more conciliatory than Buchanan's,
and by so doing convinced Confederate leaders that unless they acted, they might lose a chance to attract the eight slave states still in the
Union. Their answer was the attack on Ft. Sumter. Of this Buchanan wrote: "The Confederate States have deliberately commenced the
civil war...They were repeatedly warned by my administration that an assault on Fort Sumter would be civil war and they would be
responsible."
The war having started, Buchanan strongly supported the Union effort. However, he retired completely from public life and remained at
Wheatland until his death there on June 1, 1868.
As the war dragged on, the nation sought a scapegoat and found one in ex-President Buchanan. Perhaps no American President has
been so vilified for political purposes. The Republicans, especially, fabricated stories and twisted facts to depict Buchanan as a traitor, a
proslavery conspirator, and the principal author of the war. Those who could have set the record straight were silenced by wartime
censorship and intimidation. After the war, their statements were ignored. Buchanan, in retirement, published a document account of his
administration, Mr. Buchanan's Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion (1866), but it received scant attention. Recent scholarship
recognizes that Buchanan devoted all his talent to averting the catastrophe and that no other policy gave better promise of a peaceful
settlement.
Early Life and Career
Rise to National Leadership
The Presidency
Buchanan in History