The question remains why such an experienced and intelligent politician failed so miserably as president of the United States. While all presidencies are idiosyncratic, varying in their contexts and challenges, the issue here is what James Buchanan’s mistakes were, why they occurred, and whether they can usefully serve as benchmarks beyond their specific context. Is there something about presidential failures, just as with presidential achievements, that can be teased out to provide a road map, in this case, of ineffectiveness? Somehow the common characteristics and recurrent patterns of successful presidencies are easily classified into categories such as (to use Fred Greenstein’s model in The Presidential Difference for twentieth-century presidents) ability to communicate, political skill, vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. It is not sufficient to assert that Buchanan was deficient in these categories, because in many ways he was not. Nor should the matter be abandoned to the generalization that all unsuccessful leaders are alike in ways that we cannot categorize, whereas great leaders vary in special ways that deserve to be analyzed.
Certainly there is agreement about Buchanan’s failure, although not about its cause. Buchanan makes up the third member of that feckless triumvirate of antebellum presidential losers, along with Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce. But more failed even than they, he is usually placed among the very worst of our presidents—an irredeemable group that includes Richard Nixon, Warren Harding, and, in some polls, Ulysses S. Grant. Buchanan’s reputation has collapsed even further as Americans have come to appreciate the Civil War’s palpable benefits of emancipation and the survival of the Union. Before World War II, when it was fashionable to interpret the Civil War as an avoidable conflict and slavery as a dying institution, historians such as Philip Auchampaugh and George Fort Milton accepted Buchanan’s description of his presidency and portrayed him as a peacemaker trying to save the United States from an unnecessary war. It was a prosouthern point of view, nurtured at a time in American history when the South, having lost the war, set about the business of winning it in the history books.
In the period following World War II and the civil rights movement, the portrayal of Buchanan by historians such as Roy Nichols, Kenneth Stampp, and Michael Holt was unremittingly negative. But their historical criticism rested, incorrectly I believe, on the grounds of the president’s age, on his long years as a politician, which rendered him unable to rise to the level of a leader during the secession crisis, and on his vacillation in the Sumter crisis. The exception was Elbert Smith’s study of the Buchanan presidency, which properly paid attention to the man’s central failing as a chief executive—his prosouthernism. But overall, given the importance of his administration, James Buchanan has not attracted much historical
interest, mostly because his successor’s story is so compelling and his so dismal.
Buchanan’s biographers are more sympathetic. Fifteen years after Buchanan died, George Ticknor Curtis, a Democrat who disliked Lincoln, published a two-volume, family-authorized biography that included personal letters and original documents. Convinced that injustice had been done to Buchanan’s reputation, Curtis—who shared his subject’s rigid interpretation of the U.S. Constitution—followed the former president’s own defense. So too did Pennsylvanian Philip Klein in a biography published in 1962. Klein portrayed Buchanan as a peacemaker who confronted events beyond his control. Another loyal Pennsylvanian, the novelist John Updike, wrote a three-act play, Buchanan Dying, with bit parts for everyone from Buchanan’s housekeeper, Hetty Parker, to Ann Coleman and Charles Sumner. Updike is sympathetic to his hero, who in the moments before his death consoles himself with the thought that “once death has equalized all men, worth flies from their artifacts.” But for Buchanan, who is possibly a better subject for novelists than for accusatory historians, the reverse—the disappearance of his flawed reputation—has not occurred.
The explanation of why Buchanan failed so miserably remains a worthwhile historical consideration. How could this avowed nationalist, who said he did not want to outlive the Union, do so much to destroy it? Did he fail because the crisis was beyond the ability of any chief executive to solve and because of his inflexible reading of the Constitution? And what of the structure of the U.S. government that seemingly, at least until new interpretations in the twentieth century, gave Congress so many powers and the executive so few? Did Buchanan fall into the trap of those nineteenth-century presidents
who held themselves to be mere administrators? Were Buchanan’s failings attributable to the long period between the election of a new president in early November and his inauguration in March, circumstances that made Buchanan into a lame duck during a critical time in American history?
Or was the reason for his miscalculations and poor judgment his personality? Did Buchanan lack the level of emotional intelligence that is clearly observable in some of our best presidents? Did Buchanan have the third-rate temperament that makes it impossible to lead a nation and especially so during a period of crisis? Finally, what exactly were his fatal errors?
Some answers come from a close scrutiny of the three major mistakes of his presidency: his handling of the Kansas crisis, his refusal to act when South Carolina initiated the process of secession in November and December of 1860, and his decision, which was later reversed, to order Major Anderson back to Fort Moultrie. As to the first of these, when Buchanan continued to support the minority proslave Kansas government in Lecompton and its constitution, he did so on the grounds that it was the legal authority in the territory. Arguably he was correct. It was certainly the first one established, but it rested on fraud and violence and was never the legitimate government supported by a majority of citizens in the territory. As president, Buchanan had the authority to restart the process. His power to appoint governors and approve and submit territorial constitutions to Congress could redirect the entire process. But Buchanan did not hear the entreaties of Kansans. Nor did he listen to three of the former territorial governors, nor to most of the northern wing of the Democratic party, all of whom encouraged him to reject
Lecompton. And of course he never listened to the Republicans, whom he despised. Even when he lost the vote in the House of Representatives in early 1858, this president would not give way but instead bludgeoned Congress with another territorial bill, which was eventually repudiated by Kansans in a fair vote that summer.
It is not enough to say that Buchanan was stubborn in the Kansas crisis. Of course he was. But to an experienced official like Buchanan, avoiding a future disaster usually trumps making self-defeating commitments in the present. The real question for his dogged attachment to a failed process is why he would pursue a suicidal course that led to a traumatic division in the Democratic party, thereby ensuring the election of the Republican Abraham Lincoln. In fact Buchanan consistently acknowledged his party as one of the few surviving mechanisms available to keep the nation intact. So why destroy it?
The answer speaks to one of the palpable characteristics of failed presidencies—the arrogant, wrongheaded, uncompromising use of power. Buchanan believed that he could push legislation through Congress that would not only bring Kansas into the Union as a Democratic state but, more important for his own reputation, also solve forever the divisive matter of slavery in the territories. In this instance his experience as a public official worked against him. He assumed—and assumptions are always the heart of arrogance—that he would achieve his goals and would return to Wheatland a national hero.
The structure of the federal government had nothing to do with this failure; a more adroit, flexible politician could have handled the issue by listening to the majority. But, in a second characteristic of most failed presidencies, Buchanan was far
too ideological for the pragmatic necessities of a large diverse democratic republic. An intellectual and electoral hostage to the South, he defended that section’s interests with every bit of executive power he commanded, and that was much more than has previously been recognized. His presidency did not suffer from feebleness or insufficient power or administration by a senile sixty-eight-year-old, as so many historians have argued. Buchanan was no mere executor of the laws; he was an activist chief executive. But the problem was that he used the power with such partiality for the South.
Years before, Buchanan had chosen sides in the great crisis of America’s nineteenth century. Negligent about slavery but greatly attached to the values of southerners—especially their literal reading of the Constitution—he had surrounded himself with southerners in the cabinet, in the informal meetings of his administration, and even in his social life in Washington. As a result, he went beyond these associations not just to defend the South but to undertake a bitter crusade against the growing number of northerners who opposed slavery. He went beyond normal political custom by castigating Republicans as disloyal. And in Buchanan’s mind because many northerners were antislavery, he held the North responsible for the disruptive sectional tensions. After all it was northerners who sent antislavery petitions to Congress and failed to return escaped slaves to the South. And it was northerners, with their free-soil, free-labor intentions, who had brought catastrophe (in his view) in Kansas. Clearly Buchanan’s vision and inspiration for the future of the United States were increasingly at odds with most Americans, whose definitions of freedom and liberty did not include a slave republic dominated by a minority of slave owners.
Thus, when the crisis that was partly of Buchanan’s making
occurred and South Carolina seceded, he did nothing. Suddenly this activist president offered the nation little more than the rhetorical exercise that secession was constitutionally illegal, but that he could do nothing about it. Of course this pronouncement served only to encourage the South. Yet there were a number of precedents for military action that the president could have followed, not just the better-known ones from Washington’s and Jackson’s administrations, but those from Taylor’s and Fillmore’s, when both presidents had threatened to call out the militia and use force against Texas in its border dispute with New Mexico.
To be sure, to do nothing was to do much, because Buchanan was granting the future Confederate States of America precious time to organize and prepare for war. By no means inevitable, the American Civil War remained contingent on various episodes, to which this intended peacemaker contributed as much as anyone. With Buchanan’s mistakes, a confrontation that might have dwindled away into a minor action against one state became more certain. In this crisis three presidential failings—Buchanan’s arrogance that he could achieve peace by being a partisan of the South, his ideological commitment to southern values, and his vision of the future with slavery gradually dying out—all came together to buttress a terrible presidential miscalculation.
So too did another fatal flaw—his dependence as a lonely bachelor on his mostly southern cabinet for social companionship. Even after South Carolina seceded, Buchanan continued to lend his ear to cabinet officers who were actively conspiring against the United States. He aided and abetted this process by meeting with officials who passed his plans on to secessionist leaders throughout the South. And in the crisis over Fort
Sumter, Buchanan listened to those voices as he formulated his own plans about how to keep the peace. He ordered Major Anderson to leave Fort Sumter and return to the indefensible Fort Moultrie, where the federal troops would promptly have been overrun by the South Carolina militia. Only the intervention of several cabinet officers changed the president’s mind, although by this time Buchanan was too distraught to write the necessary memorandum. But when Buchanan had time to reflect on the matter after the war, he criticized Anderson for a move that most Americans thought saved the soul of the nation. Without Sumter the Confederates could have gone in peace. At first a self-confident chief executive, during the Sumter crisis Buchanan remembered the childhood warnings of his father and his own pessimism that every success was accompanied by a defeat. Drenched with confusion, for a time he became practically immobile.
In 1890, before he was elected president and had his own problems with presidential leadership, Woodrow Wilson set forth the ingredients of successful leadership in an essay titled “Leaders of Men.” In a democracy, argued Wilson, persuasion was essential and had to be accomplished “by creeping into the confidence of those you would lead.” Leadership required fairness as well. “Leadership for the statesman,” he wrote, “is interpretation. [A leader] must read the common thought: he must test and calculate very circumspectly the preparation of the nation for the next move in the progress of politics.”1 All of Buchanan’s presidential failings—his arrogant use of his power, his insistence on a vision that most Americans repudiated, his inflexible ideological support for the South, and his personal rigidity—can be summarized in Wilson’s description. Ultimately Buchanan failed to interpret the United States.