JAMES BUCHANAN
15th President, 1857–1861
Overall Rank: 43
Total Score: 245
Historians have ranked James Buchanan last in all three C-SPAN surveys, consistent with most other presidential rankings. The gap between Buchanan and next-to-last Andrew Johnson is significant: thirty points. Buchanan ranks last or next to last in every leadership category except administrative skills, where he bested Andrew Johnson and Warren Harding to rank third from last.
Party: Democrat
b. April 23, 1791, Cove Gap, Pennsylvania
d. June 1, 1868, Lancaster, Pennsylvania
First Lady: Harriet Lane (niece)
Age entering office: 65
Historian: Robert Strauss
Journalist and historian Robert Strauss has been a reporter and feature writer for a variety of news outlets, including the Philadelphia Daily News, NBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. He joined C-SPAN’s Q & A on October 25, 2016, to discuss his book, Worst. President. Ever: James Buchanan, the POTUS Rating Game, and the Legacy of the Least of the Lesser Presidents.
I do think you can learn from failure. I think that if the next president wants to aspire to be like somebody, they would probably want to aspire to be Washington or Lincoln. Well, you can’t recreate the country, and you can’t have the Civil War. So, what do you do next? Do you aspire to be James Monroe? I don’t know. But what you can do, is you can aspire not to be James Buchanan.
Buchanan was a good lawyer. Early on, he was a star student at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. He got thrown out for a while, but they let him back in. But he was always a top student, and he was always very sure of himself. He goes to Lancaster because it was then the capital of Pennsylvania, the largest inland city in America with six thousand people. America was pretty small then. He becomes the best lawyer there. Even though the capital moves to Harrisburg, he decides to stay in Lancaster. He defends a lot of people of note, and he makes a good buck.
He never married. There was always the speculation of whether he was gay or not. But early on… he gets engaged to Ann Coleman. Her father was one of the richest men in America; he was an iron maker. He was an older man; this was his next-to-youngest daughter. He looked after her very well. He didn’t approve of this relationship that she was having with Buchanan, but he let it go.
At some point, Buchanan comes home from Philadelphia, where he’d done some business, stops off at his friend’s house. His friend’s wife’s cousin is there, apparently a beautiful woman; he’s there for an hour or two. Of course, gossip goes around Lancaster, and Ann Coleman… breaks off the engagement.
Buchanan doesn’t know quite what to do. He stands back and says, “Well, if I let it go for a couple of weeks, it will all blow over.” In that interim time, Ann Coleman goes off with her younger sister to see their older sister. They get to Philadelphia, she doesn’t feel well; the other two go out to the theater. By the time they come back, she’s in convulsions and she dies—presumably suicide, at least that’s the speculation, that she killed herself over this relationship not working out. So, whether she killed herself or not, the idea that a guy who eventually runs for president has his fiancée dying when he’s young has to be a big story somewhere.
In a certain sense, Buchanan is the most qualified man by virtue of a government résumé to ever run for president. He was a state legislator in Pennsylvania, then he was in the US House. He was in the US Senate. He was ambassador to Britain under Franklin Pierce. Prior to that, he was ambassador to Russia under Andrew Jackson, and he was secretary of state under James K. Polk. I don’t know if we’d call it distinguished, but he had a long career in government service—pretty unusual. He was ambassador to Britain at not a particularly crucial time, but he was that. [He was also, at one time, being considered for the Supreme Court, but] he always waffled. That was his big problem, that he waffled about everything, and he was waffling about this Supreme Court decision. But he was known as the best partier in Washington. So, he has a great big party with a celebrity chef, and he keeps giving little parties to supplement it. But then in the end, he decides he doesn’t want to be on the Supreme Court, so, in a certain sense, he’s done all this for nothing. So, if you go by the number of years at a major post, he definitely is [the most qualified man to be president]. But here’s something about him: he has never proposed any significant legislation, or he never got any significant legislation passed. He was a conciliatory man.
He was a serious candidate for president three times prior to becoming the actual candidate in 1856. He was always at the top echelons, but you know the cliché about the bridesmaid who’s never the bride. There was always somebody else who had the ear of the bureaucracy… that ran the party. But eventually, in 1856, he’s the last man left standing. And on the seventeenth ballot in Cincinnati, he becomes the Democratic nominee.… [And in November, Buchanan was elected in a three-way race between Republican nominee John C. Fremont and American Party nominee and former president Millard Fillmore.]
Buchanan comes to office with his long résumé, [but] he was sort of boring to people; he was sixty-five when he was elected. After him, nobody until Reagan [and now President Trump] was that old. Two things about him are, one, in all of his papers, he never says anything bad about anybody. I don’t know what he said in verbal terms. Even people he didn’t like politically, he never said anything bad about them personally. And, [second, we know that] he loved giving parties. The inaugural ball of 1857 was the greatest party in nineteenth-century America.
He gives a fantastic inaugural ball. They put up a huge tent on Lafayette Square. Six thousand people come. Now, six thousand people is a lot in a country that only has twenty-three million people, and it’s star-spangled: a big orchestra, food that you can’t imagine, saddles of meat and oysters. Harriet Lane, his niece, is the first lady. She is the Jackie Kennedy of her time. Everything she wears, all the young women want to wear. They have trading cards that are Harriet Lane trading cards. They name a Coast Guard cutter after her, the USS Harriet Lane. It eventually fires the first shot of the Civil War from the Union side. It gets captured by the Confederates and they don’t rename it; she’s too popular. It was still called the CSS Harriet Lane.
So… Buchanan starts out in such a favorable way. All the dignitaries come. The recounting of his inaugural in the New York Times and other papers are just wonderfully written stories about the pomp and everything that had been gone from Washington, DC [under the preceding presidents]. And, then the Dred Scott decision comes down.
Buchanan comes to office at a crucial time, but it doesn’t seem any more crucial than Pierce’s term or Fillmore’s term. Slavery is the overhanging problem. He becomes president in March, as they did then, instead of January,… 1857, and he sees as his mandate to solve the slavery question. It’s not to get rid of slavery; it’s to solve the slavery question.
Buchanan was called a “doughface,” which was a Southern-leaning Northerner; they said you could massage their faces like dough. [As a politician,] he lived in Washington, and Washington was a Southern city. He was a bachelor. He went back to Pennsylvania, but most of the time he was in Washington. His friends were Southerners because more Southerners than Northerners took up residence in Washington. The railroads got the Northerners back [home] a lot easier. And, he was predisposed to think like his friends.
He wants to solve this slavery problem to keep the Union together, and he sees this court case going around. It’s called the Dred Scott case. Dred Scott was a slave to a military man in Missouri, who for a time went to what is now Minnesota, free territory, and then came back to Missouri. [The slave owner] dies. Dred Scott sues, saying, “I was free in Minnesota; I should be free.”
It comes up that the case could be on the Supreme Court’s docket. Roger Taney was the Supreme Court chief justice, who like Buchanan went to Dickinson College, so they had some sort of bond.
Taney had slaves his whole life. He was from Maryland, and he was Francis Scott Key’s brother-in-law—to show that everybody was connected [at this point in the nation’s history]. They have this discussion before Buchanan takes office, and he says you can’t just have a decision that’s Southern versus Northern. The court was split five Southerners and four Northerners. It was not going to amount to much. So, Buchanan takes it upon himself to find a Northern justice that will go along with this [ruling]. He finds a guy named Robert Grier, who, coincidentally enough, also went to Dickinson College, so, they have this bond. Grier says, “OK, I’ll go along with whatever Taney does.” And another Northerner from New York says, “I’ll write a concurring opinion.” So, it’s essentially seven to two; now, you can have a decision that might mean something—Northerners going along with Southerners.
The decision comes out two days after the inauguration. It’s said that on the inaugural platform, before Taney gives him the oath, they discuss something. Buchanan had distributed souvenir transcripts of his inaugural address, and there were a few lines written into it that in it allude to this decision that’s going to come out, and that we’re going to all be happy about it. But the Dred Scott decision is generally thought of as the worst decision that the Supreme Court has ever made.… It essentially says that every state is a slave state. It says that Dred Scott can’t sue in court. He’s not a free man; he therefore can’t sue. In fact, he’s still a slave, and in fact, slavery can’t be outlawed by individual states. It reinstitutes the most heinous parts of the Fugitive Slave Law. It negates all the compromises from before, all the ones we remember from high school, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and it essentially makes the United States a slave country.
We’d had a twenty-year expansion; things have been going great. The country’s opening up: the Louisiana Purchase, Oregon Territory, Texas, all these other lands that we’re getting. People have the American dream going on. If you don’t make it in Pennsylvania, go off to Ohio, go off to Illinois, go off to Missouri, wherever. You can make it. The railroads finance this, essentially; people speculate on different railroads. Suddenly this decision comes out. Let’s say I’ve got a tin cup factory in Cincinnati that’s going pretty well, so maybe I’ll open one in Dayton. Uh-oh, maybe this guy’s going to come up from Kentucky with his slaves [as labor] and be my competitor. So, I don’t do anything; I stop expanding. The country immediately stops expanding. People who have speculated on railroads aren’t doing so well, immediately. They go bankrupt.… Other businesses fail. So, within months, we’re in this tremendous economic panic; a greater precipitous depression than the Great Depression.
All the banks in New York close for a day. They decide not to take scrip, so you don’t have gold scraping off of that to pay your employees at the tin cup factory. But in the South, it doesn’t affect them as much because they’re an agricultural society. You can feed and clothe your family, at the very least. You can probably sell your cotton and your lima beans. But in the North, where manufacturing has gotten sway, it’s really precipitous. So, that divides the country even more.
Because the monied class was so much smaller, they were affected so greatly, so quickly. Our most recent [2008] recession—I’m not belittling it—was not like this, was not a dive off a cliff. Things happened in a matter of course, as opposed to just precipitously.
… As people who look at coins know, coins were big [in size] in the nineteenth century.… Then suddenly in 1857, coins are sized like a dime. I asked [a coin dealer why]. He said, “Oh, the Panic of 1857.” That was Buchanan’s great idea: “We’ll make the coins smaller.…” The rest of his ideas were like “to heck with you; you speculated, you deserve it. Why don’t you be like the people in the South who work hard with their hands?” So, he does nothing to ameliorate [the depression]. He just figures it’s going to play itself out. And sure enough, it does because eventually we had a lot of munitions to make in 1861 [once war broke out].
The next upcoming state is going to be Kansas. Kansas has a problem; is it going to come in free or slave? A slave contingent comes over from Missouri, makes the capital in Lecompton, a small town, and gins up a constitution that allows slavery. Non-slave people come to Topeka; they have a similar constitutional convention, just the opposite, of course. There were six slaves in all of Kansas at the time; it wasn’t like it was going to be slave territory. But the South needed another slave state,… so, of course, they were supporting it, especially people in [the slave state of] Missouri.
Something’s got to happen. Buchanan’s got to say something; he’s got to choose one side or the other. He’s got to say there’s going to be an election; or, there’s got to be something that’s going to resolve this before it becomes a big problem. But, of course, he doesn’t; he makes no decision. He sends several people out to be governor of Kansas, but he doesn’t listen to any of them, [as they were] saying this very thing.… One of the things that happens in this maelstrom is that people start firing at each other.… [Abolitionist] John Brown, who becomes much more famous later, is said to have murdered several slave owners and their families—now it’s called “Bloody Kansas.” Still, Buchanan makes no decision.
Brown gets away. It’s not like he was doing things in secret; he meets with Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass and other antislavery people. Eventually, he comes to Harpers Ferry in 1859. Harpers Ferry, if you go to it now, it’s a bucolic setting.… But back then, it was a big munitions maker, with other industries. And, it was just forty miles down the road from Washington. Brown comes there; it’s not so foolish. If he can get some of these munitions and gather some more people to his cause, maybe he can have this slave rebellion that he wants. For two days, Buchanan does nothing—nothing! He says, “Oh, let them handle it in Virginia.” Harpers Ferry was part of Virginia then.
[He takes no action] until this prominent scion, Robert E. Lee, comes home from his post in Texas to Arlington, Virginia. He goes to Buchanan and says, “I think we ought to do something.” Buchanan says, “All right, take some troops out there and see what you can do.” Well, Lee does capture Brown, and they have sort of a show trial. Brown eventually gets hanged, but by this time, he is a martyr. Victor Hugo is writing about him, Ralph Waldo Emerson is writing about him, Walt Whitman is writing about him. And, of course, that angers both sides [North and South, slavery and antislavery leading into the 1860 election], exacerbating any problem there is because of Buchanan’s inaction.
I think the differentiation of good presidents and bad presidents—Washington, Lincoln, and FDR are always at the top of the surveys that historians take—they were decisive men. You can’t come to the top of the ladder and not be decisive. Buchanan was a waffler; James Polk hated him for being a waffler as his secretary of state. He always went back and forth on decisions,… and that’s how he was as president. I could go on with the list of things that make Buchanan the worst president, and all of them have to do with not making a decision when he had to make a decision. So, that’s what the next president, whether it’s this president, or succeeding presidents, should learn: at some point, you’ve got to say, “This is the way it’s going to be.”