James Buchanan (1791 - 1868) was an American lawyer, diplomat and politician who served as the fifteenth president of the United States from 1857 to 1861. [1] He came to the office with an unusually long record in Congress, in the cabinet and in diplomacy, but his presidency was consumed by the conflict over slavery in the territories and by the secession of seven Southern states after the election of Abraham Lincoln. Historians consistently rank him at or near the bottom of presidential surveys. [2]
Early life and education
Buchanan was born on 23 April 1791 at Cove Gap, in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, the son of a prosperous merchant of Ulster Scots descent. [1] He was educated at a local academy and at Dickinson College, graduating in 1809, then read law and built a lucrative practice in Lancaster.
His fiancee, Ann Coleman, broke their engagement in 1819 and died shortly afterwards; Buchanan never married, the only bachelor to hold the presidency, and his niece Harriet Lane acted as White House hostess.
Political and diplomatic career
Buchanan entered the United States House of Representatives in 1821, first as a Federalist and later as a Jacksonian Democrat, serving five terms. Andrew Jackson appointed him minister to Russia in 1832, where he negotiated a commercial treaty. [3]
He served in the United States Senate from 1834 to 1845, then as secretary of state under James K. Polk, handling the Oregon boundary settlement and the diplomacy of the Mexican-American War. Under Franklin Pierce he was minister to the United Kingdom, and in 1854 he helped draft the Ostend Manifesto, arguing that the United States should buy Cuba from Spain and might be justified in seizing it; its publication provoked outrage among antislavery Northerners. [1] Being abroad during the fight over the Kansas-Nebraska Act left him uncompromised, and he won the Democratic nomination in 1856.
Presidency
Buchanan was inaugurated on 4 March 1857. Two days later the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, holding that African Americans could not be citizens and that Congress had no power to bar slavery from the territories. Buchanan had privately pressed a justice to join the majority and alluded to the coming ruling in his inaugural address, expecting it to settle the question; instead it inflamed it. [4]
He then backed the proslavery Lecompton Constitution for Kansas, drafted by a minority in a boycotted election, and pushed for admission as a slave state. Stephen A. Douglas and other Northern Democrats broke with him, splitting the party and destroying its ability to hold the national coalition together. [3] The Panic of 1857 added economic distress, and his vetoes of homestead and land grant college bills alienated Northern opinion.
Secession
After Lincoln's victory in November 1860, seven states declared their secession before Buchanan left office. In his final annual message he argued that secession was unconstitutional but that the federal government had no lawful power to coerce a state back into the Union. [2]
He tried to resupply Fort Sumter with the merchant steamer Star of the West, which was fired on and turned back in January 1861. Members of his cabinet resigned to join the Confederacy, federal forts and arsenals were seized, and Buchanan handed the crisis unresolved to his successor in March 1861.
Later life and legacy
Buchanan retired to Wheatland, his estate near Lancaster, supported the Union during the Civil War and published a defence of his administration in 1866. He died there on 1 June 1868. [1]
His reputation has not recovered: assessments centre on his accommodation of proslavery demands, his mishandling of Kansas and his passivity during the winter of secession, and he appears last or near last in most scholarly rankings of American presidents. [2]
