Re: [DL] The president 'fore lincoln

[Bryce <SandChigg@rocketmail.com>]

--- Matthaw@aol.com wrote:
> What happened to the guy prior to Abe Lincoln's presidency?

From http://www.whitehouse.gov (and be sure it's .gov!):

Biography: Tall, stately, stiffly formal in the high stock he wore
around his jowls, James Buchanan was the only President who never
married. 

Presiding over a rapidly dividing Nation, Buchanan grasped inadequately
the political realities of the time. Relying on constitutional
doctrines to close the widening rift over slavery he failed to
understand that the North would not accept constitutional arguments
which favored the South. Nor could he realize how sectionalism had
realigned political parties: the Democrats split; the Whigs were
destroyed, giving rise to the Republicans. 

Born into a well-to-do Pennsylvania family in 1791, Buchanan, a
graduate of Dickinson College, was gifted as a debater and learned in
the law. 

He was elected five times to the House of Representatives; then, after
an interlude as Minister to Russia, served for a decade in the Senate.
He became Polk's Secretary of State and Pierce's Minister to Great
Britain. Service abroad helped to bring him the Democratic nomination
in 1856 because it had exempted him from involvement in bitter domestic
controversies. 

As President-elect, Buchanan thought the crisis would disappear if he
maintained a sectional balance in his appointments and could persuade
the people to accept constitutional law as the Supreme Court
interpreted it. The Court was considering the legality of restricting
slavery in the territories, and two justices hinted to Buchanan what
the decision would be. 

Thus, in his Inaugural the President referred to the territorial
question as "happily, a matter of but little practical importance"
since the Supreme Court was about to settle it "speedily and finally." 

Two days later Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the Dred Scott
decision, asserting that Congress had no constitutional power to
deprive persons of their property rights in slaves in the territories.
Southerners were delighted, but the decision created a furor in the
North. 

Buchanan decided to end the troubles in Kansas by urging the admission
of the territory as a slave state. Although he directed his
Presidential authority to this goal, he further angered the Republicans
and alienated members of his own party. Kansas remained a territory. 

When Republicans won a plurality in the House in 1858, every
significant bill they passed fell before southern votes in the Senate
or a Presidential veto. The Federal Government reached a stalemate. 

Sectional strife rose to such a pitch in 1860 that the Democratic Party
split into northern and southern wings, each nominating its own
candidate for the Presidency. Consequently, when the Republicans
nominated Abraham Lincoln, it was a foregone conclusion that he would
be elected even though his name appeared on no southern ballot. Rather
than accept a Republican administration, the southern "fire-eaters"
advocated secession. 

President Buchanan, dismayed and hesitant, denied the legal right of
states to secede but held that the Federal Government legally could not
prevent them. He hoped for compromise, but secessionist leaders did not
want compromise. 

Then Buchanan took a more militant tack. As several Cabinet members
resigned, he appointed northerners, and sent the Star of the West to
carry reinforcements to Fort Sumter. On January 9, 1861, the vessel was
fired upon and driven away. 

Buchanan reverted to a policy of inactivity that continued until he
left office. In March 1861 he retired to his Pennsylvania home
Wheatland--where he died seven years later--leaving his successor to
resolve the frightful issue facing the Nation. 

-Bryce

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