James Buchanan

Dickinson College nearly threw him out in 1808 for drinking and vandalizing the town. He talked his way back in and graduated with honors the next year. He was the eldest son of an Ulster-Scot storekeeper who had landed from County Donegal in 1783 and become the wealthiest man in Mercersburg. He was born in a log cabin at Stony Batter in the Pennsylvania mountains. He read law in Lancaster and by 1821 was earning more than 11,000 dollars a year. He was cross-eyed, one eye near-sighted and the other far, and held his head tilted in conversation, a tic Henry Clay mocked in Congress. In 1819 Anne Coleman broke their engagement and was dead within weeks at 23. Her father barred him from the funeral. He never married.

Four years, 1857 to 1861. The Dred Scott decision landed two days after he took the oath. He spent his capital forcing the proslavery Lecompton constitution on Kansas and split his own party doing it, marched an army across the plains to occupy Utah, watched a bank panic run through the North, and lost seven states before he could hand the office over. BriefHistory tells that record and the secession winter at the end of it. What follows is a narrower question about how he did business.

In January 1857, before he was sworn in, Buchanan wrote to Justice John Catron to ask how the Court would rule in Dred Scott's case and to suggest that a broad decision would suit him better than a narrow one. Catron replied that the Southern majority needed one more vote, and that Buchanan should work on his fellow Pennsylvanian, Justice Robert Grier. Buchanan wrote to Grier and Grier joined the majority, then kept the president-elect informed of the Court's private debates. On March 4 Buchanan told the country from the inaugural platform that the question of slavery in the territories would be speedily and finally settled by the Supreme Court, and that he would cheerfully submit to whatever it decided. He already knew. Two days later Taney read it out.

He went home to Wheatland and spent seven years defending himself. Threatening mail arrived daily. Lancaster shopkeepers displayed his portrait with the eyes inked red, a noose drawn around the neck and TRAITOR across the forehead. Five of his former cabinet members took jobs in the Lincoln administration and none of them spoke for him. In 1866 he published Mr. Buchanan's Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion, the first book a former president wrote to answer his critics, and blamed abolitionists. Congress approved a memorial to him in 1918 and did not unveil it until 1930. C-SPAN has polled historians four times since 2000. He has finished last every time.

James Buchanan's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Oregon Treaty other
  Negotiated as Polk's Secretary of State, fixing the border at the 49th parallel 1846
• Ostend Manifesto other
  Argued the United States could take Cuba by force if Spain refused to sell 1854
• Fourth Annual Message to Congress speech
  Secession is unconstitutional and the government cannot stop it 1860
• Mr. Buchanan's Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion book
  The first memoir a former president wrote in his own defense 1866

• 1809 aged ~18 Graduates from Dickinson with honors after nearly being expelled
• December 9, 1819 aged 28 Anne Coleman dies at 23, weeks after breaking their engagement Her father refused to let him attend the funeral.
• 1832 aged ~41 Andrew Jackson sends him to St. Petersburg as minister to Russia
• March 6, 1845 aged 53 Becomes Secretary of State under James K. Polk
• March 4, 1857 aged 65 Inaugurated, having privately lobbied a justice in the Dred Scott case
• March 6, 1857 aged 65 Taney reads the Dred Scott decision two days into the term
• October 18, 1859 aged 68 Sends Robert E. Lee and a detachment of Marines to Harpers Ferry
• 1866 aged ~75 Publishes his defense of the administration
• June 1, 1868 aged 77 Dies at Wheatland of respiratory failure at 77

• Roger B. Taney 1777–1864
  Chief justice whose Court shaped federalism but is principally remembered for the disastrous Dred Scott decision. lobbied
• Dred Scott 1800–1858
  Enslaved man whose lawsuit produced the Supreme Court ruling that Black Americans could not be citizens. ruled against under his watch
• Robert E. Lee 1807–1870
  Confederate commander whose military reputation and later commemoration became central to Civil War memory and the Lost Cause. dispatched
• Stephen A. Douglas 1813–1861
  Illinois senator whose popular-sovereignty doctrine and debates with Lincoln framed the crisis over slavery. rival