The Buchanan Legacy:
A Western Pennsylvania Perspective
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President James Buchanan |
After the ambassador to the Court of St. James refused to dress in pompous attire when attending a formal dinner at the invitation of Queen Victoria, he retuned to the United States, where ordinary Americans hailed him as a hero. Although London newspapers lampooned him for dressing as a conservative country gentleman, the American people hailed James Buchanan for his raw courage in placing simple principle above ceremonial etiquette. It was this act of courtly defiance that set Buchanan on the road to the presidency.
Buchanan was the man with the most political and diplomatic experience. He was a prominent lawyer, served multiple terms in the Pennsylvania state legislature, U.S. Congressman, U.S. Senator, Secretary of State from 1845-1849, ambassador to Great Britain and Russia, and was even offered a seat on the Supreme Court. A man of great ambition, his path led to the White House.
It was ironic that Buchanan believed his presidency was essential to the preservation of the United States. Yet, by the time he left the White House, several states pulled out of the Union.
Since the 1856 Democratic platform mirrored his personal beliefs, James Buchanan could have written them. These planks called for (1) a federal government of limited power, (2) vigorous support for a fugitive slave law, (3) upholding the domestic institutions of the states, (4) an end to anti-slavery agitation, and (5) “proper efforts to assure U. S. ascendancy in the Gulf of Mexico.”
When word reached Pittsburgh that the Cincinnati Convention picked a Pennsylvanian as the Democratic candidate for the presidency, the local newspapers were divided along political lines. The Post praised Buchanan and Breckenridge as “the right men for the right place.” Another newspaper, The Dispatch, was pleased with the decision. The editors believed the Democratic ticket was a strong one. However, The Gazette marched to the Republican drum, accusing the Democrat platform of resting on the extension of slavery.
Buchanan’s politics were perfectly in sync with the Democratic Party of the mid-nineteenth century. “I am a states rights man, and in favor of a strict Constitution. The older I grow and the more experience I acquire, the more deeply does this doctrine become in my mind.” Buchanan also opposed the concept of a national bank: “The Democratic party must either triumph over the Bank or the Bank will crush the Democracy.” Fearful of a slave uprising, he was an advocate of annexing Texas. He believed that Southern slaves should have been absorbed into Texas to grow agricultural products, while economically useless slaves could drift into Mexico where they would be assimilated into that nation’s “darker-hued population.” Like others in his party, Buchanan was a staunch advocate of war with Mexico. However, he cautioned Polk against taking Mexican territory below the Rio Grande.
Buchanan’s concept of “Manifest Destiny” tended to be more radical than most other Democrats. On two occasions, he suggested purchasing Cuba from Spain, but his proposals received little Congressional support. For Buchanan, it was essential to remove all European interests from the America’s. The only exception would be to allow Great Britain to remain in Canada. As early as 1835, he remarked: “Providence has given to the American people a great and glorious mission to perform, even that of extending the blessings of Christianity and of civil and religious liberty over the whole North American continent. Within less than fifty years there will exist one hundred million of free Americans between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans . . . What, sir! Prevent the American people from crossing the Rocky Mountains? You might as well command Niagara not to flow. We must fulfill our destiny.”
Some of Buchanan’s views were not as controversial as the fact that he was a bachelor. Mr. Buchanan raised seven of his orphaned nieces and nephews, and provided for financial support for a number of children and grandchildren of his siblings. Never-the-less, the Republicans exploited the fact that Buchanan had never married as “a lack of essential quality” and contended that it would be impossible for a single man to “thoroughly understand human nature.”
Dr. Philip Shriver’s article “Bachelor Father addresses the controversy in great detail. Quoting the New York Herald, July 14, 1856, Shriver illustrates how “The Bachelor Candidate” was lampooned:
It’s time to be doing, the play has begun,
There’s mischief a brewing as
sure as a gun,
The Buck and Breck noodles are
stupidly bent
On choosing a Bach for our next
President.
A bachelor who, like his
species, you know,
Is afraid of the girls, and to
union a foe.
Then up and be doing, for
danger is rife,
A man is but moonshine who
hasn’t a wife.
Just think what queer things
his receptions would be,
Uncouth gander parties, as all
must agree;
For a house with no mistress a
place is, I ween,
Where no well-bred lady would
wish to be seen.
Klein’s article contends that Buchanan’s only true love was Ann Coleman. Even though he kept company with many prominent women after Ann Coleman’s tragic death, he expressed no wish to marry. In more recent years, some have raised suspicion that Buchanan was a homosexual. This speculation was based on one Congressman’s reference to Buchanan’s friendship with Senator William King of Alabama as “Mr. and Mrs. Buchanan.” If there was anything to the allegation of an illicit affair between Buchanan and King, no one will ever know because Harriet Lane, Buchanan’s niece, and Catherine Ellis, King’s niece, destroyed their uncles’ letters to each other when Buchanan became president.
Jean Baker’s biography of James Buchanan takes an objective look at the insinuation. Baker contends that Buchanan lacked facial hair and never shaved, which could have indicated low levels of testosterone. This hormone is also responsible for the human sex drive. According to Baker’s biography, Ann Coleman broke off her engagement to Buchanan because he paid more attention to business than to her. Baker also speculates that Buchanan may have been too ambitious to jeopardize his career by engaging in a sexual relationship with another man because homosexuality was considered immoral, as well as illegal.
One local supporter of James Buchanan was Stephen Foster. His sister, Ann Eliza, was married to the candidate’s brother. Foster served as musical director of the James Buchanan Glee Club and wrote songs for that group. One song was “The White House Chair:”
Let all our hearts for union be
For the North and South are one
They’ve worked together
manfully
And together they will still
work on.
Chorus
Then come ye men from every
state
Our creed is broad and fair
Buchanan is our candidate
And we’ll put him in the White
House Chair.
With three major candidates seeking the presidency, Buchanan won the 1856 election with 45% of the popular vote. James Buchanan was elected as the most promising presidential candidate. He had more political and diplomatic experience than any other man in the country. He was ambitious and eloquent. Yet, history rates him as the worst American president. Often Buchanan is depicted as a man who did little or nothing to avert the Civil War. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison once wrote, “He prayed, and frittered and did nothing.” Yet a review of his four-year presidency reveals that “inactivity” hardly constitutes his term in office.
Buchanan’s journey to Washington for his March inauguration started on a bad note. While in route, he became very ill with debilitating dysentery. Apparently frozen pipes at the National Hotel spilled fecal matter into the hotel’s kitchen and cooking water. Several persons died. Buchanan survived and made it to Washington in time for his inauguration.
By staffing his cabinet mostly with pro-slavery Southerners, Buchanan alienated himself from moderate Northern Democrats, as well as Republicans. Referring to the Republicans as the source of instigation and sectionalism, Buchanan wrote to a friend in December 1856: “The great object of my administration will be to arrest, if possible, the agitation of the Slavery question at the North and to destroy sectional parties.”
Buchanan liked to think of himself as neutral on the issue of slavery. In his inaugural address, Buchanan reiterated, “The sacred right of each individual must be preserved.” It was inferred in this remark that individual applied only to a white male citizen. Further in the same address, the president accused northern fanatics of producing “great evils to the master, the slave, and to the whole country.” So while Buchanan claimed indifference on the slave issue, there is strong indication that Buchanan feared that an end to slavery would turn every black man into a rapist.
The first crisis to hit the Buchanan presidency was the Panic of 1857. Buchanan contended the federal government was without resources to provide relief to those victims of the economic depression. Furthermore, he curtailed new public works projects, recommended further restrictions on state banks and their issuance of paper currency, and called for legislation requiring the redemption of public debt in gold.
Then in September 1857, after a group of 125 pioneers were massacred in Mountain Meadows, Utah, Mr. Buchanan went to war with Brigham Young and his Mormon followers. To this day, there is a debate as to responsibility for the massacre: Paiute Indians, non-Mormon whites, Mormons, or renegade Mormons. Appalled that Brigham Young had 16 wives and 56 children, Buchanan was convinced that the Mormon militia was responsible. Young argued if Mormons were responsible, they would be tried under Church law. To demonstrate a show of federal power, the president demanded Young surrender the responsible parties to federal marshals or face military consequences. When Brigham Young said the threat constituted an act of war, Buchanan dispatched 2,500 troops.
Although Buchanan believed that the large force of American troops would serve as a deterrent against future Indian attacks on settlers, the campaign started as a mismatched affair. The United States troops were mainly infantry, while the Mormon militia was mounted. As the army pushed into Utah, the Mormon militia outnumbered the American army. Furthermore, the Mormons successfully harassed the federal supply lines and destroyed 75 wagons.
Thomas Kane, a Pennsylvanian, successfully brokered a peace agreement before there was a serious confrontation. This enabled Buchanan to claim that American authority had been restored to the Utah territory.
If this were not enough, the issue of Kansas’s statehood raised its head again. Buchanan inherited the bloody state of affairs. He feared that Georgia and Mississippi would leave the union if Kansas were not admitted to the United States as a slave state. Then he had to address charges that federal troops were used against the free state residents of Topeka and Lawrence. Eventually the issue resolved itself via a public referendum.
Buchanan was an expansionist and a hawk. He looked at expanding American influence in China and Japan, establishing military posts in Mexico, acquiring Alaska from Russia, and even asked Congress for $30 million for the purchase of Cuba. One of Buchanan’s most flagrant acts of militarism was when he dispatched 2,500 sailors and marines and 19 warships with 200 guns to punish Paraguay. Buchanan claimed that the military mission was necessary to protect American interests abroad, after Americans living in Paraguay claimed the government appropriated their land and a surveying vessel was fired upon. Historians have harshly criticized this act of Buchanan’s foreign intervention since the coastal defenses of the United States were weakened at a time when the country was literally falling apart.
The fifteenth president also received criticism for failing to enforce an international treaty banning the slave trade. Slave traders from every country knew that America was lax on enforcement of the treaty, so they often flew the American flag. When the British government ordered its fleet to stop suspected slave ships, Buchanan sent several strong warnings to London that Washington would not tolerate the boarding of vessels flying an American flag by any navy except its own. To back up his warning, Buchanan dispatched a number of naval warships. Since Britain did not wish for a replay of the War of 1812, the British ordered their West Indies fleet home.
Refuting Morison’s contention that the Buchanan’s administration was marked by inactivity, biographer and historian Jean Baker wrote:
“In fact Buchanan’s failing during the crisis over the Union was not inactivity, but rather his partiality for the South, a favoritism that bordered on disloyalty in an officer pledged to defend all the United Sates. He was that most dangerous of chief executives, a stubborn mistaken ideologue whose principles held no room for compromise. His experience in government had only rendered him too self-confident to consider other views. In his betrayal of the national trust, Buchanan came closer to committing treason than any other president in American history.”
Today one expects a former president to write his memoirs, giving a detailed justification of his years in the White House. In 1866 James Buchanan published Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion. By writing in the third person, Buchanan employed a literary technique that assumed objectivity. However, the ploy was little more than a failed president’s attempt to blame everyone else for the woes of the nation.
Even the first paragraph of the book set the tone for his political apologetics:
“That the Constitution does not confer upon Congress power to interfere with slavery in the States, has been admitted by all parties and confirmed by all judicial decisions ever since the origin of the Federal Government. This doctrine was emphatically recognized by the House of Representatives in the days of Washington, during the first session of the first Congress, and has never since been seriously called in question. Hence, it became necessary for the abolitionists, in order to furnish a pretext for their assaults on Southern slavery, to appeal to a law higher than the Constitution.”
His work even took on a moral tone when he inferred that “if slavery was a sin; then the sin rested with the slave holder, not the people of New England.” Then he accused the abolitionists of resorting to “indirect means outside the Constitution to accomplish their object.”
In his eyes, the election of Lincoln was the catalyst that propelled the cotton states to leave the Union. In 1856 Buchanan’s platform consisted of keeping the union in tact. Hence, Lincoln was the cause and scapegoat for the disintegration of the United States during the waning years of the Buchanan administration. In his account of his presidency, Buchanan wrote:
“On the 6th November, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States, and immediately thereafter the Legislature of South Carolina passed an Act for the call of a Convention to carry the State out of the Union, calculating that by this precipitate violence she might force the other cotton States to follow in her lead. . . Every discerning citizen must now have foreseen danger to the Union from Mr. Lincoln’s election. After a struggle of many years, this had accomplished the triumph of anti-slavery over the slaveholding States, and established two geographical parties, inflamed with malignant hatred against each other, in despite of the warning voice of Washington.”
Although James Buchanan never specifically referred to himself, the inference was clear that he was the “warning voice of Washington.” He also used his pen to attack the Republicans and secession parties. According to Buchanan, the political bickering resulted in his inability to act during his last four months in office. In his book, Buchanan wrote: “The Democratic party, to which he owed his election, had been defeated, and the triumphant party had pursued his administration from the beginning with a virulence uncommon even in our history. His every act had been misrepresented and condemned, and he knew that whatever course he might pursue, he was destined to encounter their bitter hostility. No public man was ever placed in a more trying and responsible position. Indeed, it was impossible for him to act with honest independence, without giving offence both to the anti-slavery and secession parties, because both had been clearly in the wrong place.”
Keep in mind that Buchanan’s history of his administration was written less than two years after the conclusion of the Civil War. Thus, he easily pulled out the “I told you so” argument. He wrote: “To prosecute civil war would require an expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars. This would entail an enormous debt on ourselves and our posterity, the interest on which could only be paid by oppressive taxation. The President knew that, in the mean time, many of the great commercial, manufacturing, artisan, and laboring classes would be exposed to absolute ruin. It was therefore his supreme desire to employ all the constitutional means in his power to avert these impending calamities.”
Buchanan dished out sharp blows to the abolitionists, who, in his opinion, were responsible for supporting John Brown. “John Brown was a man violent, lawless, and fanatical. Amid the troubles in Kansas he had distinguished himself both by word and by deed, for boldness and cruelty. His ruling passion was to become the instrument of abolishing slavery, by the strong hand, throughout the slaveholding States. With him, this amounted almost to insanity.” Buchanan also chastised the Republicans for having ever “since honored him a saint or a martyr in a cause they deemed so holy.”
Some historians contend that after financial scandals involving John B. Floyd and William Russell were revealed, Buchanan was too softhearted in dealing with his Secretary of War. However, Buchanan’s account portrays the president as demanding Floyd’s resignation on mere suspicion of scandal.
The former president praised his own fiscal policies. He quoted his own annual message of December 1860. “The sum of $61,000,0000, or, at the most, $62,000,000, is amply sufficient to administer the Government and to pay the interest on the public debt, unless contingent events should hereafter render extraordinary expenditures necessary.” However, his ledger failed to mention that during Buchanan’s tenure the national debt increased by $12,000,000.
Some historians also disagree with Buchanan’s assessment of the overwhelming success of the military campaign against Brigham Young’s Mormon militia. For Buchanan, the show of force “had a powerful effect in restraining the hostile feelings against the United States which existed among the Indians in that region, and in securing emigrants to the far west against their depredations.” Although Buchanan inferred that the military was also successful in their venture in restoring U.S. authority in Utah, the reality was that the Mormon War ended in a stalemate when both sides realized they had nothing to gain from continued hostilities.
Every story may have two sides, but it is obvious by the fact that in most polls James Buchanan is rated as the worst president in American history – even below three presidents who faced impeachment. Most Americans really never accepted Buchanan’s position that his tenure as president was successful. History simply does not agree with the former president’s assessment: “The rancorous and persistent opposition to Mr. Buchanan’s administration throughout its whole term, did not divert it from devoting its efforts to promote the various and important interests intrusted (sic) to its charge. Both its domestic and foreign policy proved eminently successful. This appears from the records of the country.”
Sources
Baker, Jean H., James Buchanan, New York: Times Books, 2004.
Buchanan, James, Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion, North Stratford, New Hampshire: Ayer Company Publishers, Inc. (reprinted) 1997.
Carlson, Robert E. “Pittsburgh Newspaper Reaction to James Buchanan and the Democratic Party in 1856,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, Vol. 39, Summer 1956.
Klein, Philip Shriver, “Bachelor Father – James Buchanan as a Family Man,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine,” Vol. 50, July 1967.
Ulken, Ellen Hunter, Beautiful Dreamer: The Life of Stephen Collins Foster, Xlibris Corp. 2005.
| James Wudarczyk is author of the book Pittsburgh's Forgotten Allegheny Arsenal, and co-author of the books, Monster on the Allegheny and Other Lawrenceville Stories and A Doughboy's Tale and More Lawrenceville Stories. In addition, he has written many articles and reviews for various publications, most of which deal with Pittsburgh. |