Why Every President Sucked

No. 15 · The Presidents

James Buchanan’s Biggest Failures

1857–1861

Historians don’t agree on much about presidents. They agree on this one.

Who was James Buchanan?

James Buchanan was the 15th president of the United States, serving from March 4, 1857 to March 4, 1861, the four years leading into the Civil War. Born in Pennsylvania in 1791, he was a lawyer who spent four decades in public life: congressman, senator, minister to Russia, Secretary of State under James K. Polk, and minister to Britain. Being posted in London during the Kansas-Nebraska fight kept him clear of it, which helped him win the 1856 Democratic nomination on the 17th ballot. He beat Republican John C. Frémont and former president Millard Fillmore with about 45 percent of the popular vote and 174 of 296 electoral votes.

On paper he was the most experienced candidate in the field. That is the part that makes the next four years so hard to explain.

Why is Buchanan considered the worst president?

C-SPAN’s 2017 survey of historians ranked James Buchanan 43rd out of 43. A 2018 poll of political scientists by the American Political Science Association put him second-worst. In a 2006 poll, historians named his failure to prevent the Civil War the single worst mistake ever made by a sitting president.

In short: he helped steer the Supreme Court toward Dred Scott, split his own party over Kansas, offered no relief in a financial panic, and then spent the secession winter arguing that nothing could be done. In my book, Buchanan gets one entry and one point: he was elected out of hope that he could keep the country together, and he couldn’t. That’s the headline. What follows is the record behind it, with the song I wrote for him threaded through.

Chords: C, G, D

James Buchanan, you’re our last hope
we need you to warn both sides of dopes

1. He worked the Supreme Court before he was sworn in

In January 1857, two months before his inauguration, Buchanan wrote to Justice John Catron about the pending Dred Scott case and suggested that a broad ruling would be wiser. Catron answered on February 10 that the Southern majority would likely rule against Scott but might have to do it narrowly unless Justice Robert Grier joined them. Buchanan then wrote to Grier, who joined the majority. The Battlefields Trust calls the correspondence a breach of presidential ethics, and the historian Paul Finkelman argues that Grier had been keeping Buchanan informed of the Court’s deliberations.

In his March 4 inaugural address, Buchanan said the question of slavery in the territories would be “speedily and finally” settled by the courts. Two days later, Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion held that Black Americans could not be citizens and that Congress could not bar slavery from the territories. Nothing was settled. There is no explicit evidence of a plot, but the fingerprints were enough: Northerners saw a president who had gone looking for the answer he wanted.

tell the north that the south has rights
tell the south it ain’t worth the fight

2. He broke his own party over Kansas

In late 1857, a proslavery convention in Lecompton, Kansas drafted a constitution and put it to a referendum that antislavery residents boycotted. Buchanan backed it anyway and sent it to Congress on February 2, 1858, over the objection of Stephen Douglas, the most powerful Democrat in the Senate. The Senate approved it. The House did not. Northern Democrats offered a compromise, letting Kansans amend the constitution at any time instead of waiting seven years, and Buchanan rejected it.

Congress then passed the English Bill, which offered statehood on conditions, and in August 1858 Kansas voters rejected Lecompton. Buchanan went after Douglas’s allies with patronage, firing them from federal jobs. In the 1858 midterms, almost half of the Northern Democratic seats went to Republicans, who took control of the House. Kansas finally entered the Union in January 1861 as a free state, the opposite of what he had pushed for.

3. “Reform not relief”: the Panic of 1857

Months into his term, the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company announced it was insolvent, and a national panic followed. By year’s end about 1,400 state banks and 5,000 businesses had failed. Buchanan refused federal relief, kept paying the government’s debts in gold and silver, froze funding for public works, and urged states to rein in bank lending. The economy recovered within a few years, but federal spending had risen about 15 percent by the time he left, and the downturn fed the sectional anger he was supposed to be managing.

4. “Buchanan’s Blunder”: the Utah War

In November 1857, Buchanan sent roughly 2,500 troops to Utah to replace Brigham Young as governor with a non-Mormon, Alfred Cumming. The order rested on uncorroborated reports, and he never spoke to Young directly. Mormon settlers prepared for war, and Young’s forces destroyed wagon trains and Army property. The mess ended only when Buchanan’s friend Thomas L. Kane went west as a private envoy and talked both sides down. Buchanan granted amnesty to Utahns who accepted federal authority and pulled the troops back. Congress blamed him for an unnecessary war that had added millions to the Army’s budget.

or just give up
we’ll follow the leader, that’s you

5. The most corrupt administration since 1789

In March 1860 the House voted 115 to 45 to investigate whether Buchanan had used money or patronage to bend Congress to his will. The committee, chaired by Pennsylvania Republican John Covode, did not find grounds for impeachment. Its June 1860 majority report went further than anyone in the White House wanted: it called the administration the most corrupt since the Constitution was adopted. It alleged corruption among his cabinet members and said he had tried to buy votes for Lecompton.

Buchanan answered with a written protest. “I defy all investigation,” he wrote, and he complained that the House had “made my accuser one of my judges.” Republicans printed copies of the report anyway and used them as campaign material in the election that followed.

6. A cabinet of men who were leaving

Historian William G. Shade called Buchanan’s cabinet a disaster. Four of its Southern members were slaveholders who later backed the Confederacy, and Douglas’s supporters were shut out entirely, so the advisers all agreed with the man they were advising. Secretary of War John Floyd faced an embezzlement scandal and sent large numbers of firearms to Southern states; Buchanan refused to dismiss him. Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb resigned in December 1860. When the crisis arrived, much of the president’s own cabinet was already on the other side of it.

pick a side, any side
yell a lot, don’t you hide

7. The secession winter

He was warned. In October 1860, General Winfield Scott, the Army’s commanding general, warned that Lincoln’s election would likely push at least seven states out of the Union. Buchanan distrusted Scott and ignored his recommendations.

He told the country he was powerless. In his December 3 message to Congress, Buchanan blamed Northern anti-slavery agitation for the crisis. He argued that secession was unconstitutional, then argued that the president could not use force to stop it. He proposed a convention to amend the Constitution to protect slavery. The convention never met, and critics in both the North and the South found the position impossible to defend.

Then it happened. South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860, and by February 1, six more states had followed. Floyd persuaded Buchanan to revoke an order reinforcing Southern forts, then resigned on December 27 after Major Robert Anderson moved his garrison from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter on his own. On January 5, 1861, Buchanan sent the Star of the West with 250 men and supplies to Sumter. The order authorizing Anderson to give covering fire never arrived, and the ship turned back without delivering anything. Buchanan did not respond militarily. His conciliatory posture, the Battlefields Trust notes, gave the Confederate government room to form and operate.

On March 3, 1861, Anderson reported that Sumter was running low on supplies. Lincoln was inaugurated the next day. Confederate forces opened fire on the fort on April 12.

you’re our last chance
before our civil war dance

After the White House: a retirement spent blaming everyone else

Buchanan retired to Wheatland, his Pennsylvania estate, in 1861. He backed the Union but opposed the Emancipation Proclamation, got threatening letters, and found that his former cabinet members would not defend him in public. In 1866 he published his own book, Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion, which put the blame on abolitionists and Congress.

The historian William Cooper, writing for the Miller Center, says most historians treat Buchanan’s passivity as a prime contributing factor in the coming of the war. His biographer Jean Baker argues the problem was not inaction but partisanship toward the South, and that he came close to treason. One honest note: the Miller Center essay calls him honest and legally capable. That was the problem. He was a good lawyer in a moment that needed a leader.

Hear the song

Read the full lyrics, browse all 43 songs, or head to the book.

Sources

By Eric Olsen · Published