James Buchanan: The American Presidents Series: The 15th President, 1857-1861 - Hardcover

Baker, Jean H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805069461 ISBN 13: 9780805069464

Publisher: Times Books, 2004

Synopsis

A provocative reconsideration of a presidency on the brink of Civil War

Almost no president was as well trained and well prepared for the office as James Buchanan. He had served in the Pennsylvania state legislature, the U.S. House, and the U.S. Senate; he was Secretary of State and was even offered a seat on the Supreme Court. And yet, by every measure except his own, James Buchanan was a miserable failure as president, leaving office in disgrace. Virtually all of his intentions were thwarted by his own inability to compromise: he had been unable to resolve issues of slavery, caused his party to split-thereby ensuring the election of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln-and made the Civil War all but inevitable.

Historian Jean H. Baker explains that we have rightly placed Buchanan at the end of the presidential rankings, but his poor presidency should not be an excuse to forget him. To study Buchanan is to consider the implications of weak leadership in a time of national crisis. Elegantly written, Baker's volume offers a balanced look at a crucial moment in our nation's history and explores a man who, when given the opportunity, failed to rise to the challenge.

About this title

About the Author:

Jean H. Baker is a professor of history at Goucher College. She is the author of several books, including The Stevensons and Mary Todd Lincoln, and is at work on a book about the suffrage movement. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

  1 Ascension–from Stony Batter to the Cabinet, 1791–1848 Born in 1791, James Buchanan was almost as old as the United States, a point of pride throughout his life. The location of his birth, in a log cabin at the foot of North Mountain in the Alleghenies of southern Pennsylvania, was no accident. James Buchanan, Sr., had chosen Stony Batter, in Cove Gap, Franklin County, for its economic opportunities. His decision to live and later buy a trading post there eventually ensured his prosperity. An orphaned immigrant from County Donegal in northwest Ireland, twenty-two-year-old James Buchanan, Sr., had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1783, landing, like many others, in Philadelphia. He had made his way south and west through the rich and expensive farmland to live with an aunt and uncle in York County, Pennsylvania. The Buchanan clan was well known in Scotland and Ireland. Some members had moved from the barren hills of Scotland to Ireland to find a better life than the one they suffered during a period of starvation in the first part of the eighteenth century. Others migrated to protect their freedom of worship as Presbyterians from the assaults of kings and bishops of the Church of England. Ireland proved a way station, and they were soon on the move again, this time across the Atlantic to America. James Buchanan came with the advantages of education and ambition, though no money. Some of his neighbors later charged that he was a hard bargainer in his financial dealings. Inspired by the implacable doctrine of his Presbyterian faith that he must serve the Lord through hard work and stern duty in this world so that he might find a place in the next, he intended to get ahead. He expected his sons to do likewise. In fact Buchanan exemplified the Scotch-Irish of the so-called fourth migration to America, over a quarter of a million of whom arrived in Pennsylvania and Delaware in the eighteenth century. Some moved across the Susquehanna River into Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky; others found opportunity in the rich agricultural state of Pennsylvania. James lived briefly in the town of York with a wealthy uncle who owned a tavern as well as two hundred acres of farmland. There he heard talk of the mountain gap picturesquely named Stony Batter —batter is the Gaelic word for road. Five roads intersected there, and the number of horses in transit was sometimes so great as to require a large corral. In this tiny frontier community, there were often so many goods that the place seemed an emporium set in the wilderness. Four years after his arrival, in 1787, the year in which Americans wrote a Constitution and founded a new nation, James Buchanan bought the trading post in Cove Gap where earlier he had served as an apprentice to the owner. Here, for his broker’s fee, he sold and bartered finished goods from Baltimore to settlers over the mountains. Then in 1788 he returned to York County to marry Elizabeth Speer, the daughter of a prosperous Scotch-Irish Presbyterian neighbor of his uncle. The next year George Washington took the first presidential oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. And in what became a civic duty for Americans, citizens of the Republic were encouraged to marry and create families that would lay the foundations of national morality and progress. James was the second child, and oldest surviving son, of James and Elizabeth Speer Buchanan’s large family of eleven children. An older sister died as an infant and, after James, five daughters arrived in the two-year pattern of fecund reproduction accomplished by American wives whose contraception ended when they stopped nursing their infants. Surrounded by younger sisters and an adoring mother who quoted Milton and Shakespeare to her children and engaged them in discussions about public affairs, James occupied a privileged but challenging position in his family. Years later in an unfinished autobiography, he described his father as having great force of character, but he credited his mother for any distinction that he had attained. “She excited [my] ambition, by presenting … in glowing colors men who had been useful to their country or their kind, as objects of imitation.” Only when he turned thirteen did a younger brother survive. Eventually, three more brothers arrived. One was named George Washington Buchanan. The Republic’s first president had become his mother’s hero after he stayed in a nearby tavern during the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794—95. Another was named Edward Younger after one of his mother’s favorite English poets.1 In 1791 James Buchanan, Sr., had moved his family a few miles east—from the rugged isolation of Stony Batter to a large farm near Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. A few years later, in 1794, as his financial circumstances continued to improve, Buchanan uprooted again, this time to a two-story brick home in Mercersburg, a small village populated by eighty families. There he established a store and became a prosperous merchant. At every opportunity he invested in real estate, and soon James Buchanan was the richest man in town. His wife had urged the move, anxious for the kind of gentility that was impossible on the frontier. Now the Buchanans joined Presbyterian Scotch-Irish neighbors named Campbell, McAllen, and McKinistry. In Mercersburg young James Buchanan attended school in town. At the Old Stone Academy, he studied the traditional classical curriculum of Latin and Greek, along with mathematics and literature and a little history—the standard fare of the private academies of his generation. He was by all accounts, including his own, an excellent student. With enough money for the leverage of higher education, James Buchanan, Sr., sent his eldest son to Dickinson College in nearby Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where in 1807 he entered the junior class of fourteen students. Throughout his life as a testament to his formality, he had no nickname and was never junior, nor Jim, nor Jimmie except later to his political enemies, who called him “Ten-Cents-a-Day Jimmie” after he supported banking legislation considered unfavorable to workers. At the end of his life and behind his back he became “Old Buck” and “Old Public Functionary,” but he remains one of the few American presidents without a nickname. Like his father, he had no distinguishing middle name. The following year James Buchanan was expelled from Dickinson for bad behavior. Certainly the first half of the nineteenth century was a time of student rebellions in colleges throughout the United States, as riotous youths tested the authority of ministerial presidents and authoritarian institutions. At Yale there was the so-called Bread and Butter Riot; Harvard suffered the Great Rebellion of 1832; and Brown and Princeton endured student rebellions as well. During the disorganized early stages of Dickinson’s history, James Buchanan joined a group of noisy classmates who, engaging in collective acts of unruliness, drank at nearby taverns, threw food in the dining room, broke windows, and kept the good citizens of Carlisle awake with their revelry. It is not the expulsion that is surprising, but rather Buchanan’s insistence in his unfinished autobiography that he was not “dissipated” himself, but had drunk, roistered, and disturbed in order to be considered “a clever and spirited youth” by his fellow students. Popularity and the approval of others mattered to this young man, and would throughout his life. Only through the intervention of his Presbyterian rector with the trustees and the Presbyterian minister who was the head of the college was Buchanan reinstated. A year later he graduated with honors, though not the highest honors he thought he deserved. In doing so, he became one of a few thousand young men of his generation to graduate from college. But he never forgave Dickinson, describing the college as “in a wretched condition” when he attended and acknowledging years later that he felt “little attachment to [his] Alma Mater.” For the next stage of his life James Buchanan did not need a college degree, choosing the law as his profession—not, as Woodrow Wilson once said, as the requisite stepping-stone for politics, but in order to earn a living. He moved to Lancaster, a town of eight thousand and at the time the capital of Pennsylvania. As all lawyers knew, the public business of the state and the associations with legislators offered many opportunities to find clients. And there was an even more compelling reason to move to Lancaster. Buchanan had been accepted as a student by the most eminent lawyer in town, James Hopkins. For the next two and a half years he served as an apprentice under the supervision of his well-known and respected mentor. In the custom of the day, Buchanan read and discussed the legal authorities, Joseph Chitty and William Blackstone, as well as the U.S. Codes, the Constitution, and the case law developing around it. In Buchanan’s time there were only three law schools in the United States. Instead the law was a craft, casually handed down from one practitioner to another, who in turn, as Buchanan did after he set up his practice, opened their offices to other young aspirants. It was another seventy years before the American bar and institutions of higher learning created schools for specialized training. Still, Buchanan’s self-discipline in learning his chosen profession’s habits of orderly thinking and dependence on precedent significantly influenced his political principles and actions. As Buchanan promised throughout his life, he intended to follow the law and the Constitution. Buchanan gave “severe application” to his studies, becoming a familiar figure in the streets near the courthouse square where Hopkins kept his office. Here the young man walked about, transposing aloud principles of law into his own language and understanding. “I studied the law and only the law,” he declared. Later Buchanan acknowledged this process of speaking aloud as the method by which he learned how to give spontaneous political speeches, though in fact most of his speeches were prepared. In 1810, during his first year with Hopkins, his father delivered a stern advisory: “Guard against temptations that may offer themselves,” wrote the senior Buchanan to his son, “knowing that without religion all other things are as trifles and will soon pass away … . Go on with your studies and endeavor to be eminent in your profession.” And though his father supported all his sons until they became lawyers or clergymen, he informed his eldest son, whom he held to the highest standards of paternal expectation, “[I have suffered] privation in giving you a good education [which] will be compensated by the station in society you will occupy.”2 Buchanan inherited his lifelong caution from his father. He lacked the sanguine optimism of successful political leaders, who focus on hopeful future solutions for current problems. The aphorisms that shaped his life were grim: “It is the destiny of man to learn that evil treads closely on the footsteps of good”; “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” And while he was considered a good conversationalist, he was never a man of humor. Soon he established himself as a rising star among Lancaster’s twenty-six lawyers, most of whom had to scavenge for clients. By 1812 the city fathers of Harrisburg, in the opinion of those in Lancaster, had stolen the state capital away from a town that was still the largest inland community in the United States. With ambitions as lofty as those of the Buchanan family, Lancaster had expected to be the capital of the United States. Some lawyers quickly uprooted and moved to Harrisburg, Philadelphia, or the growing community of Pittsburgh. But Lancaster remained Buchanan’s home for the rest of his life. After he registered with a notary and passed an informal oral exam given by a committee of the court in that casual arrangement marking the legal accreditation system for this generation, he was accepted into the Pennsylvania bar. A stern teacher, Buchanan now told his own young law apprentices to give up dissipation and bow to his control or face dismissal. His income rose rapidly from less than $1,000 in 1813, the first full year of his practice, to a substantial $11,297 in 1821 (approximately $175,000 today), the year he left Lancaster for Washington as a U.S. congressman. The law was hard work. Buchanan once described the practice that took him to several adjacent counties as “extensive, laborious, and lucrative. It increased rapidly.” He was a general-practice lawyer in the Second Judicial District who argued cases in the dusty courthouses of southern Pennsylvania—a jack-of-all-trades who could write wills and contracts, argue guardianship cases for orphans, and litigate property claims. For an ambitious young man, his legal career also had the advantage of putting him in touch with the state’s political leaders. Even as a neophyte, James Buchanan sought high-profile cases that brought prominence, more clients, and larger fees in a circular process that made him, before he was thirty-five, one of the best-known lawyers in southern Pennsylvania. His prudent money management, limited expenses, and adroit land and building investments around Lancaster rapidly made him a prosperous capitalist, worth over $300,000 (nearly $5 million in today’s currency) by the time he died, and that after nearly forty-five years in low-paid public service. No doubt with the help of Hopkins, whose statewide reputation guaranteed an overflow of clients, Buchanan emerged as the counsel of choice for several prominent politicians. One colleague described his legal style as straightforward, unimaginative, and tenacious. When he was twenty-four years old, with only three years’ experience, Buchanan defended Judge Walter Franklin in the latter’s impeachment trial before the Pennsylvania state senate. A member of the court of common pleas, Judge Franklin had ruled in a classic states’-rights-versus-federal-government controversy that once a militia was nationalized, Pennsylvania’s authority over a refusant ended. Accordingly the state could not fine a citizen of Lancaster who had declined to serve in the War of 1812. At a time in American legal history when the distinction between judicial error and impeachable offense rested on party prejudice, judges became hostages for decisions that did not suit the populace. Buchanan, at the time a member of the Federalist party, argued that Judge Franklin had committed no crime or misdemeanor. Franklin might have misjudged the issue, and certainly he had made an unpopular ruling. In his winning argument before the Pennsylvania senate, Buchanan held that only judicial crimes and malfeasance amounted to impeachable offenses. Outside of court, Buchanan attended to the social necessities required for an ambitious young lawyer on the rise—joining fraternal associations where he met the leaders of the Lancaster community. He became a Mason and later chief master of his lodge; he was a manager for a society ball held in the White Horse Inn, and, most important for his political future, he served as president of the Washington Association, an organization of local Federalists. Like his father, James Buchanan supported that party’s program of nationally subsidized internal improvements, protective tariffs, and a U.S. Bank. Soon he was a sought-after speaker who intrepidly—for it was wartime—criticized President James Madison’s leadership during the War of 1812. Later, when he was accused of taking positions hostile to those of the Democratic party, Buchanan explained that he had simply followed his father into the Federalists. Buchanan could make his case against Madison and the War of 1812 with credibility. He had volunteered for a few weeks in a Lancaster company of young men who had no official status as members of the organized...

About this edition

• Publisher: Times Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0805069461
• ISBN 13: 9780805069464
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192
• Editor: Schlesinger Jr. Arthur M.