And although he wouldn’t give up Fort Sumter, his inaction gave the new Confederacy time to organize. Wisely limited and restrained as is his power under our Constitution and laws, he alone can accomplish but little for good or for evil on such a momentous question.”īuchanan did little else during the crisis. “It is beyond the power of any president, no matter what may be his own political proclivities, to restore peace and harmony among the states. For this the people of the North are not more responsible and have no more fight to interfere than with similar institutions in Russia or in Brazil,” Buchanan said.īuchanan also explained why he wasn’t actively involved in the secession battle as president. As sovereign States, they, and they alone, are responsible before God and the world for the slavery existing among them. “All for which the slave States have ever contended, is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way. In his State of the Union message to Congress, Buchanan said he believed the South’s secession wasn’t legal, but the federal government didn’t have the power to stop it. Within three months after the election, seven states had left the Union as Buchanan remained as a lame-duck president until Lincoln could take office in March 1861. The Democrats were left with two presidential nominees (Douglas and John Breckinridge), which almost ensured Lincoln’s election. (Douglas defeated Lincoln in the 1858 senate election in Illinois.) At the Democratic convention, he managed to derail Douglas’ campaign to be the sole nominee who would take on Abraham Lincoln. The country also went into an economic recession as the Civil War approached.īy 1860, it was apparent that Buchanan wasn’t going to be a candidate for re-election. (There were also reports Buchanan may have influenced the court’s ruling.) The Dred Scott decision angered and solidified Buchanan’s Republican opponents, and it drove a wedge into the Democratic Party. Buchanan supported the theory that states and territories have a right to determine if they would allow slavery. Sandford case, which came shortly after the inauguration.
In his inaugural address, Buchanan called the territorial issue of slavery “happily, a matter of but little practical importance.” He had been tipped off about the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott v. It was all downhill from there for President Buchanan.īuchanan became severely ill and almost died from an illness that was spread throughout his hotel in Washington, where he traveled for meetings as president-elect. Fremont, of the newly formed Republican Party, in the 1856 presidential election. minister to Great Britain.Īt the Democratic convention in Cincinnati in 1856, Buchanan took the lead from the incumbent president, Franklin Pierce, on the first ballot and then battled Senator Stephen Douglas from Illinois for the presidential nomination.īuchanan won on the 17th ballot and defeated John C. He was a five-time member of the House of Representatives, the secretary of state under President James Polk, and the U.S. Of course, Lincoln was a hard act to precede or follow: Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson is usually cast as Buchanan’s biggest rival for the title of worst president (along with the scandal-plagued Warren Harding from the early 1920s).īuchanan came to the presidency under somewhat traditional but trying circumstances. It’s that final point that has been the lasting part of the Buchanan presidency, with his apparent indifference to the onset of the Civil War, that has riled up so many academics.
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