James Buchanan

James Buchanan has for decades been dubbed the worst president in American history. His failure to quell the simmering arguments over slavery between southerners increasingly angry at northerners and northerners increasingly angry at southerners and his lack of action when the south exploded into secession has earned him the ire of nearly all historians. I agree that Buchanan was an abysmal president. For reasons I will outline in the coming paragraphs, Buchanan was a wretched excuse for a "leader" whose deadly ineptitude nearly cost the existence of the Union and of the United States of America. But because his situation was largely constructed by his predecessors - namely Franklin Pierce - I cannot bring myself to declare him the worst of all time. Still, he was a very dangerous man placed in an office where he could and did end up decimating the stability of America.

When Buchanan, a Democrat, defeated the Republican John C. Fremont in the 1856 election, the country was paying close attention to a Supreme Court case called Dred Scott v. Sandford. Dred Scott was a slave living in Missouri whose master took him to Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, both of which banned slavery. Upon returning to Missouri, Scott concluded that having temporarily lived in those 2 free states automatically emancipated him. So, he sued his master, registering the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, which, by 1855 and 1856, had reached the lap of the Supreme Court. After becoming president-elect, Buchanan wrote to a member of the Supreme Court and learned that they were planning to side with the south on the case's central question: Could slaveowners keep their slaves as property while visiting free states?

Once he learned about the court's plans, Buchanan came up with a vile plan: He would write letters to the rest of the Supreme Court and urge them to zoom out and make Dred Scott v. Sandford about more than just slaves temporarily kept in free states. He would encourage them to make the case about slavery as a whole. Thus, the Supreme Court would prove that slavery was Constitutionally-protected, something that Buchanan hoped would convince Americans to stop arguing over slavery. The Supreme Court was persuaded by Buchanan's words and issued its opinion on March 6, 1857, two days after Buchanan's inauguration.

In this opinion, the Supreme Court not only protected the ability of slaveowners to maintain their slaves' status as chattel when temporarily residing in free states but also stated that the federal government was unable to Constitutionally restrict or prohibit slavery within the unorganized territories. Most shockingly, however, they stated that black people were automatically disqualified from obtaining citizenship solely due to the color of their skin and the origin of their ancestors. Buchanan, not realizing that the opinion had actually worsened the country's divisions rather than healed them, openly and adamantly supported the ruling.

Back in 1854, Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the residents of the Kansas and Nebraska Territories to vote on whether their area would allow or ban slavery. This resulted in a giant wave of pro- and anti-slavery settlers into the Kansas Territory - everyone agreed to let Nebraska ban slavery - in order to sway the elections in favor of their view on slavery. The pro-slavery settlers drafted the Lecompton Constitution, which not only permitted slavery but also prohibited free blacks from moving to Kansas. Free blacks already living in Kansas were excluded from the Lecompton Constitution's local bill of rights. Despite being a Pennsylvanian who personally disliked slavery, Buchanan supported the Lecompton Constitution and worked to get it enacted.

Five months after the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, a company called the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company collapsed on August 24, 1857. This sparked a gargantuan flood of paranoia amidst the nation's stock owners and speculators, who all withdrew their deposits from banks and shares from corporations. This, coupled with the loss of gold when a ship called the USS Central America sank and the decline in European demands for American crops once farmers left the military following the end of the Crimean War, sparked a recession known as the Panic of 1857. Buchanan did very little to address this, ignoring the plight of unemployed Americans and instead relying on a policy of "reform, not relief", i.e. rearranging the economy to prevent future recessions rather than solving the current recession. He succeeded in neither.

In general, Buchanan's economic policy was quite harmful. His sole redeeming quality in this area was the Morrill Tariff, but I only support that because I'm a protectionist. If someone endorsed free trade, then this would only worsen Buchanan's score. Buchanan vetoed a bill that would have provided free federal land to new agricultural colleges, thus making it harder for people to access the education they needed to pursue jobs in the farming sector. When then-Senator and future-President Andrew Johnson proposed an early draft of the Homestead Act, a law that expanded economic opportunity by letting nearly all Americans access 160-acre plots of federal land for just $26 upfront and $1.50 for each of the next 6 months, Buchanan vetoed it, closing off upward mobility and displaying his elitism.

Having served as an ambassador to Russia and later in Britain in the past, Buchanan was more competent in foreign policy. He both established US transit rights in Nicaragua and arrested William Walker, an American dictator who had set up an illegal and despotic state in that country. Most impressively, he also prevented a war with Britain. In 1846, James K. Polk - who Buchanan was secretary of state for - purchased the southern half of the Oregon Territory from Britain. Polk and British officials decided that the border between American Oregon and British Oregon would be a channel between the San Juan Islands. The issue, which was obvious yet never highlighted, was that the San Juan Islands contained 3 channels.

Because of this ambiguity, both Americans and Britons settled on the San Juan Islands. On June 16, 1859, an American farmer discovered a pig eating his potatoes and then shot the pig dead in a fit of rage. That pig happened to be the property of a British farmer, who demanded the American's arrest. The other Americans on the San Juan Islands then demanded protection from the US military, resulting in similar demands from the Britons out of their country. In October of 1859, Buchanan was informed of this crisis and how it risked sparking war between the US and Britain. He diverted this by sending General Winfield Scott to the San Juan Islands, who convinced Britain to agree to keep no more than 100 soldiers on the San Juan Islands until the islands' clear owner was identified. Scott set the same limits on his own country.

While Buchanan deserves credit for his handling of this crisis (which is often referred to as the Pig War), his other flaws arguably cancel this accomplishment out. This is especially true because at the same time he diffused the Pig War, he tried to use the skirmishes between Americans and Mexicans on the US-Mexican border as an excuse to start a war with Mexico. He only failed in this endeavor because John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry left the American people too distracted to focus on Mexico. He also tried to annex Cuba without factoring in the Cuban people's will, only being stopped by Republicans in Congress obstructing his attempts. Buchanan's only other positives were admitting Kansas, Oregon, and Minnesota into the Union and inviting the first black performer to the White House.

On March 5, 1860, anti-Buchanan Republicans in Congress set up the Covode Committee. Chaired by the titular John Covode of Pennsylvania, the committee existed to investigate the Buchanan Administration in an effort to find something to impeach Buchanan on. On June 16, 1860, the Covode Committee disbanded upon publishing its final report, which revealed that while Buchanan had none nothing he could be impeached for, he presided over the most corrupt administration in American history up until that point. This fact shocked the American people. But in reality, the true crisis, the true test Buchanan had to face, was in November.

The 1860 election featured 4 major candidates: The Republican Abraham Lincoln was one of them. The Democratic Party had divided over Buchanan's support for the Lecompton Constitution. The Northern Democrats opposed the Lecompton Constitution, fearing that it would repel abolitionists from the Democratic Party. The Southern Democrats sided with Buchanan. Since Buchanan declined to run for reelection, the Southern Democrats nominated his vice president John C. Breckinridge. The Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas. The fourth contestant was John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party, which supported slavery but opposed southern secession.

Due to the split in the pro-slavery vote, the corruption of the Buchanan Administration, and Americans' increasingly anti-slavery views, Lincoln won the election. The south was outraged at these results. In fact, in protest of Lincoln's victory, South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860. Mississippi followed on January 9, 1861. Florida and Alabama then seceded over the course of the next two days. Georgia seceded on January 19, 1861, as did Louisiana on January 26, 1861, and Texas on February 1, 1861. Exactly a week later, on February 8, 1861, the newly-seceded states merged to create the Confederate States of America.

As this took place, Buchanan did almost nothing to address the secession crisis. While he did denounce secession as unconstitutional, he also paradoxically claimed that the federal government was unable to prevent the states from seceding. Apparently, Buchanan believed that some laws - even laws meant to maintain the unity of the nation - were never meant to be enforced. Rather than using federal troops to quell the rebellion as Millard Fillmore did when South Carolina tried to secede in 1850, Buchanan simply attempted to appease their pro-slavery views. For example, Buchanan supported the Crittenden Compromise, a collection of proposed Constitutional amendments that would have:

• Barred any of the rest of the Crittenden Compromise from being repealed
• Revived the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in any area of the Louisiana Purchase located above the southern border of Missouri with the exception of Missouri
• Required the federal government to financially reimburse any slaveowner who irretrievably lost a slave due to the efforts of abolitionists
• Clarified that the federal government could not ban slavery on land it owns in slave states
• Barred the federal government from banning slavery
• Barred the federal government from regulating the slave market
• Barred Washington DC from banning slavery until both Virginia and Maryland did so and even then, only after the people of Washington DC agreed to ban slavery in a popular referendum

On February 28, 1861, Buchanan, in the closing days of his presidency, also asked Congress to draft a Constitutional amendment that would have barred the federal government from instituting a nationwide ban on slavery. Known as the Corwin Amendment, Congress drafted and approved the measure on March 2, 1861. However, the south refused to return to the Union because they didn't think the Corwin Amendment would be genuinely enforced. Perhaps this story, the story of the Corwin Amendment, best sums up Buchanan's presidency: He was a northern man who despised slavery in his personal life. Yet, he was willing to set those cherished principles aside in order to appease the south. But he couldn't even do that. He sold his soul to make the south happy, but didn't even get the smile - or perhaps just the quiet - he was so desperate for.