James Buchanan, the fifteenth President of the United States, was sixty six years old when he took office. A subdued, old gentleman with a bland personality and a large, overbearing physique, Buchanan was nominated for the Presidency primarily for his lack of involvement in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Being nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other, Buchanan always held his head to one side, a habit that made him appear as if he were paying strict attention to the person addressing him, even when he wasn't. He dressed conservatively, but always wore a high collar to cover scars on his neck. Single minded, with a tendency to be vindictive, he was a shrewd politician and a pro-slavery Unionist who was committed to settling the disputes of the day by way of compromise. His refusal to meet the first strains of southern rebellion with force caused northern radicals to saddle him with the blame of the Civil War.
James Buchanan was born on April 23, 1791 in Stony Batter, Pennsylvania. He was the second child of ten born to Elizabeth and James Buchanan. James Buchanan Sr., an Irish emigrant, owned and operated a frontier trading post in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. James Buchanan Jr. received his formal elementary and secondary education in Mercersburg, before moving to Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1807, where he enrolled at Dickinson College. Buchanan was expelled for disorderly conduct during his first year of college, but was reinstated by way of the Dickinson Board of Trustees and went on to graduate with honors in 1809. After college, Buchanan moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania where he studied law. James Buchanan passed the bar in 1812.
Immediately after passing the bar, Buchanan was appointed assistant prosecutor to Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. He left this position in 1814 to join a small militia that was being organized to go to Baltimore and fight the British. Buchanan's company saw little fighting and returned home within two months. Back in Lancaster, Buchanan served two consecutive terms on the Pennsylvania State Assembly. He spent a few years building up his law practice before being elected to the United States House of Representatives as a Federalist in 1820.
While practicing law in Lancaster, James Buchanan fell in love with Ann Coleman. They were engaged to be married in December of 1819, but canceled the wedding after a bitter argument. On the eve of what was supposed to be their wedding, Ann left for Philadelphia to live with her sister, where she died a few days later. Rumors of suicide were never confirmed, but the Coleman family prohibited James Buchanan from attending her funeral. James Buchanan never married. The role of White House Hostess during his administration was performed by his niece, Harriet Lane.
Buchanan spent over ten years in the Senate beginning in 1820. He was a fierce critic of fellow Federalist John Quincy Adams, and a strong supporter of Andrew Jackson. In 1828, Buchanan joined the Democratic Party. President Andrew Jackson appointed him minister to Russia in 1831. After organizing a commerce treaty with Russia, Buchanan returned to the United States in 1833. He was appointed to the United States Senate the following year. In the Senate, Buchanan became a leading conservative Democrat and was elected Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He declined an appointment to the position of United States Attorney General during the Van Buren Administration and a seat on the Supreme Court during the Tyler Administration.
James Buchanan campaigned for James K. Polk in 1844, and accepted the position of Secretary of State that was offered to him by President Polk the following year. As Secretary of State, Buchanan played a major role in securing the Oregon Territory for the United States.
James Buchanan sought the Democratic nomination for President in 1848, but lost out to Lewis Cass. Franklin Pierce won the election and appointed Buchanan minister to Great Britain. While in Britain, Buchanan wrote the Ostend Manifesto with the United States ministers to France and Spain. The Manifesto was a declaration of the American Government's intention to use force in obtaining Cuba from Spain if Spain refused to sell. It was a response to a successful slave uprising on the island that the American Government feared might spread to the United States. Though ratified by Congress, the Ostend Manifest was never enforced.
When Buchanan returned from Britain, he received the national Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Buchanan's nomination was largely due to his being out of the country when other leading Democrats were supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which had lead to the crisis known as "Bleeding Kansas." In the general election of 1856, Buchanan failed to win a majority in the popular vote, but took every southern state, which was enough to secure his victory over John Fremont, the candidate from the newly-formed Republican Party, and former President Millard Fillmore, the American Party candidate. James Buchanan became the fifteenth President of the United States on March 4, 1857.
As President, Buchanan put down many abolitionist uprisings and supported the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required Northerners to turn in runaway slaves. Early in 1857, the Dred Scott case came before the Supreme Court. Scott had been a slave owned by an army surgeon from Missouri. In 1834 the surgeon was stationed at Rock Island, Illinois, then free soil under the Missouri Compromise, and took Scott along with him. In 1838 Scott and his owner returned to Missouri. Upon the death of his owner in 1846, Dred Scott sued for his freedom, claiming that his residency in Illinois during the time of the Missouri Compromise had made him a free man. One Missouri court declared that he was free, and another court declared that he was not. The case was passed on to the Supreme Court. On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney decided against Scott on the argument that African Americans were not citizens, and, therefore, they were not entitled to use the courts for such purposes as suing for freedom. The ruling went further than it had to by declaring that the Missouri Compromise had been a violation of the Fifth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which states that the federal government could not deprive any citizen of their right to own property. Using the Bill of Rights, Chief Justice Taney declared that the right to own slaves was a national right, except in states where the people of the states had voted to waive that right. President Buchanan not only supported this decision and subsequent interpretation of the Constitution, but had personally hired a lobbyist and used his influence as President Elect to bring the decision about. The Dred Scott Case was used by the newly-formed Republican Party to gain support by claiming it was direct evidence of pro-slavery corruption within the highest levels of the Democrat-controlled federal government.
When the pro-slavery government at Lecompton, Kansas illegally drafted a pro-slavery constitution and submitted it to Congress for admission to the Union, governor of Kansas, Robert J. Walker, returned to Washington to inform the President of the document's corruption. President Buchanan refused to believe Walker and supported the Lecompton Constitution's ratification in Congress. When a legal vote was finally taken in Kansas, and the pro-slavery Constitution was overwhelmingly rejected by residents in spite of Congressional threats to reject Kansas' admission to the Union under any other constitution, President Buchanan still supported the Lecompton Constitution. The result was a split in the Democratic Party, between northern Democrats led by Stephen A. Douglas and southern Democrats led by the President.
President Buchanan was not nominated for re-election in 1860. The southern half of the Democratic Party nominated Vice President John C. Breckinridge, and the northern half nominated Stephen A. Douglas.
The victory of the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, in the election of 1860 triggered the secession of South Carolina from the Union. President Buchanan believed that secession was illegal, but did not think that he had the right to use force against the rebelling states. When southern forces seized federal forts in the South, President Buchanan did not act. He did ask Congress for authorization to increase the size of the federal army, but his request was denied. On December 26, 1860, Union forces took back Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. On January 9, 1861, when a Union ship entered Charleston Harbor with relief supplies for the forces at Fort Sumter, South Carolina forces fired upon the ship and forced it to turn back. Within a few months of South Carolina's secession, six other states had seceded from the Union. The rebel states set up a provisional government and elected Jefferson Davis as its president. Though President Buchanan refused to recognize the Confederacy, he did not cut off negotiations with the rebelling states and continued to search for a peaceful solution to the crisis.
James Buchanan left office on March 4, 1861, and returned to Wheatland, his home near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Criticism of his handling of the secession crisis moved him to write Mr. Buchanan's Administration on the Eve of Rebellion in 1866. In this book Buchanan defends his inaction by stating that there were eight southern states still in the Union at the time he left office; he argues that harsh treatment of the rebels would have forced these other states to secede as well. Buchanan goes on to say that the Union Army was too small for a war at this time, and that he wanted to leave his successor with a chance to reach a peaceful solution. He stressed his support of Lincoln's retaliation to the attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, and notes with pride that up until this date Lincoln had followed a similar course of action to his own.
