James Buchanan

president james buchanan
fifteenth president of the united states

interesting facts
James Buchanan was certainly a good host. When England's Prince of Wales came to visit in the fall of 1860, so many guests came with him, it's said the president slept in the hallway!
James Buchanan is the first and only President that never married.

quote
"If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering this house as I am in leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country." - James Buchanan to the newly elected Abraham Lincoln

biography
James Buchanan's parents were Scotch-Irish immigrants. They settled in south-central Pennsylvania at the close of the Revolutionary War. His father, James Buchanan, was a successful storekeeper and landowner. From his mother, Elizabeth Speer Buchanan, he learned to appreciate good books.

The future president was born near Mercersburg, Pa., April 23, 1791. He attended school at Mercersburg, where he studied both Latin and Greek. At the age of 16 he entered Dickinson College as a junior. After his graduation in 1809 he studied law in Lancaster. He was admitted to the bar three years later.

Buchanan was an immediate success as a lawyer. He had a wide knowledge of the law and great ability as a public speaker, a talent which he had cultivated in college.

After working as a lawyer for two years Buchanan entered politics though his father advised him against it. In 1814 he was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for the first of two terms.

During his service in the state capital Buchanan became engaged to be married to Ann Coleman. The engagement was broken by a quarrel, however, and the young lady died soon after. Buchanan was heartbroken. He never married and later he became the nation's only bachelor president.

In 1820 Buchanan was elected to the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. Here he served ten years, first as a moderate Federalist and then as a Jacksonian Democrat. He became minister to Russia in 1832 and negotiated the first commercial treaty with that country for the United States. Two years later he was elected to the United States Senate from Pennsylvania. Twice reelected, he served until 1845 when he resigned to become secretary of state under President James Knox Polk. In this position he presided over the annexation of Texas and helped settle the Oregon boundary dispute. He also tried to buy Cuba from Spain for 120 million dollars.

At the end of Polk's administration, Buchanan retired to his newly purchased estate, Wheatland, near Lancaster, Pa. He was a strong candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 1852 but lost to Franklin Pierce. He supported Pierce in the campaign and was named minister to Great Britain.

In 1854 he joined with Pierre Soule, minister to Spain, and John Mason, minister to France, in framing the Ostend Manifesto. The recommendation--to take Cuba by force if necessary--increased Buchanan's popularity at home because the nation was eager to pursue its "manifest destiny" by acquiring more territory. His residence abroad also added to his political standing at this time because it separated him from the trouble caused by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.

At the Democratic convention of 1856 Buchanan was unanimously nominated for president on the 17th ballot. John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky was nominated for vice-president. Opposing Buchanan was the Republican party's first presidential candidate, John Charles Fremont . Former President Millard Fillmore was the nominee of both the American (Know Nothing) and Whig parties.

Although the combined popular vote of his two opponents was greater than his own, Buchanan won the election. He polled 174 electoral and 1,832,955 popular votes, compared to 114 electoral and 1,339,932 popular votes for Frémont and 8 electoral and 871,731 popular votes for Fillmore. Buchanan owed his election to the support he received from the South and from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, Illinois, and California.

Socially, Buchanan's administration was an outstanding success. He had been chosen as the guardian of his orphaned niece, Harriet Lane, and she acted as his hostess and entertained brilliantly. In foreign affairs the administration was popularly received. In domestic affairs, however, the president could find no way to deal effectively with the critical question of slavery. The split between the slave and the free states steadily widened, and the danger of secession became ever greater. There was hope that the problem might be settled by a court decision. This hope faded when almost the entire North rejected the 1857 verdict of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case.

Civil war was already raging in Kansas, where slaveholders and Free-Soilers tried to gain control of the state government. Influenced by threats of secession from radical Southerners, Buchanan urged Congress to admit Kansas as a state under the 1858 Lecompton Constitution. This would have permitted slavery in the state. Congress refused to accept the constitution, and Kansas was kept out of the Union for another three years.

In 1860 the Democratic party split into two groups. Neither of the groups would accept Buchanan as its nominee, because it was obvious he could not win. The Northern Democrats named Stephen A. Douglas for president; the Southern Democrats chose Vice-President Breckinridge. This split secured the election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln.

Buchanan's administration reached a crisis during the winter of 1860-61, between the election and the inauguration of Lincoln. The victory of a Republican president opposed to the extension of slavery led to actual secession by Southern states. On Dec. 20, 1860, South Carolina withdrew from the Union. By Feb. 1, 1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana had seceded, and on March 2 Texas joined the Confederacy.

Although he opposed secession, Buchanan believed that there was no way for him to prevent such action. He put much of the blame on the Republicans because they had denounced the Dred Scott Decision and had refused to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. This wavering attitude angered many leaders on both sides. Six Cabinet members resigned within six weeks.

In January 1861 Buchanan sent the steamer Star of the West to resupply besieged Fort Sumter. When the ship was turned back by the Confederates, Buchanan abandoned all attempts to assist Federal outposts in the South. Meanwhile the Union's war supplies in the South were lost.

On inauguration day in March, Buchanan escorted President-elect Lincoln to the ceremonies and then accompanied him to the executive mansion, the White House. Returning to the more peaceful atmosphere of Wheatland, Buchanan told his neighbors that he had parted from Lincoln with the comment: "If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering this house as I am in leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country."

Buchanan was an honest, sincere man, who by hard work achieved the highest offices in the country. Unfortunately he became president at a time when extraordinary leadership was needed if the Southern states were to remain in the Union. Under more normal circumstances his qualities as a hardworking politician of compromise and accommodation would have served the country admirably.

Throughout the war the former president supported Lincoln's administration in its fight for the Union. He lived quietly at Wheatland and wrote a vigorous defense of his own administration. It was first published in 1865 under the title The Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion. Buchanan died at Wheatland in 1868.