Interregnum: Jefferson Davis (1808-1888)

“He saw himself as a faithful American, even though he tried to destroy the Union that to him had become subverted. He always identified himself as a constitutional patriot and true son of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers” (p. 655).

I know, I know—I must be mentally sick to add—actually add—another book onto my already incomprehensibly long reading list. But this chance is literally too good to miss. Let’s set the record straight though: I do not class Jefferson Davis up there with the rest of the legitimate, whether we like them or not, Presidents of the United States, however a perverse sense of justice forces me to add his biography to all the others. Let’s just say that after reading all about Lincoln and the Civil War, I want to see the other side of the coin and judge accordingly. So here I am, pausing on the inevitable path to Andrew Johnson, to take in a little information on the brief history of the President of the Confederate States of America.

Now when I say “brief history” I am being facetious because the biography that I chose for Jefferson is over 600 pages long! Since I’m not merely interested in Davis’ CSA-years, I had to find a book that would give me a thorough account of the man who aided in breaking the Union so I read Jefferson Davis, American by William J. Cooper Jr
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).

Jefferson Davis was born the last of ten children on June 3, 1808 in Kentucky. However, his father, on the eternal quest for means, soon moved the family to Louisiana and then onto Mississippi. As the baby of the family, Jefferson would be educated to the highest degree possible beginning at the age of 7, when he was sent into Kentucky to a catholic school. Two years later he was moved to a prep school closer to his family in Mississippi and finally, in 1823, he was sent back to Kentucky to Transylvania College. This small college was not good enough for his baby boy, so Mr Davis Sr worked it so Jefferson was invited to learn at West Point Academy. Even though Jefferson was not good at math or science he managed to scrape by at West Point, graduating four years later in the middle to his class.

He immediately was placed into the army’s infantry as an officer, but since there was nothing much to do, he seriously questioned this career path. “Quarrelsomeness, drinking, even violence became endemic in an officer corps that could anticipate no continuing military education, few chances for promotion, and limited social outlets. Resignations were common” (p. 42). At one point he was stationed at Fort Crawford in the Wisconsin Territory under Colonel Zachary Taylor, the future President of the United States. There he met and fell in love with Taylor’s daughter, Sarah Knox. Taylor disliked having his daughter marry a military man so he refused to countenance the match. Jefferson and Sarah continued to meet often in secret.

The biggest military event in these years between the War of 1812 and the Mexican War was the Black Hawk War, which took place on the Mississippi River around Missouri and Illinois. Davis missed this opportunity to gain some military laurels for himself because he was on leave pretty much through the whole thing. However, he reported for duty at the end of the engagement and was actually put in charge of escorting Black Hawk to Jefferson Barracks in Missouri. During the trip, the two men grew to respect and admire each other.

Another military opportunity popped up around this time for Davis. Recently the US government had established a new military unit to patrol the burgeoning southwest around the Mississippi River, called the Dragoons and Taylor promptly promoted Davis into this group. As nice as this new promotion was, Jefferson found himself in the middle of nowhere and forced to work for inferior men. In December 1834, he was court-martialed due to his missing roll call in the middle of a rainstorm. He defended himself and was eventually acquitted but Jefferson had had enough. He sent in his resignation and immediately married Sarah Taylor (with Zachary’s eventual permission) in June 1835.

For their honeymoon, they headed south to New Orleans where, tragically, they both fell ill with malaria. Davis would eventually recover, even though he would experience intermittent malarial symptoms the rest of his life, while Sarah, after only 3 months of marriage, died. Her grieving, sick widower was sent to Cuba to recover and eventually he returned to Mississippi where his brother gave him a cotton plantation. Jefferson spent the next feverish years making this plantation, Brierfield, into a successful venture. He did what he set out to do, while also beginning to dabble in Mississippi politics as a Democrat. In 1843, he lost his very first election to the state Congress, but it was a start.

Even though he was, for the most part, a successful planter and budding politician, Jefferson’s private life merely encompassed his own immediate family members. Soon, while he was on a visit to his brother, Joseph, he met Varina Howells, who though only seventeen to Jefferson’s thirty, captured his fancy. They were married in February of 1845, which also marked Jefferson’s explosion onto the political scene when he was voted into the US House of Representatives.

In Washington, he was a fervent supporter of the Polk administration and voted for the Mexican War. He enjoyed politics but being a military man himself, he realized that the war would need his services. Besides, he had become quite close to Zachary Taylor, now a general, who could use his help. He was voted in as the colonel for the First Mississippi militia and in 1846 joined Taylor in Mexico. Davis acquitted himself very well in the war, earning high honors for himself and for the First Mississippi in the battles of Monterrey and Buena Vista. The war then turned its attention to General Scott’s invasion of Mexico City and so Davis went back to Mississippi on leave.

Once home again, he was no longer a Congressman. He had had to resign his position while in Mexico, but the people of Mississippi loved their war hero so much that they instantly appointed him to the vacant seat in the Senate. While there he was a strong antagonist of the Compromise of 1850, voting against every single piece of legislation that came through in regards to it. It passed anyways but he would forever be critical of that bill and its effect and treatment of the southern states.

In 1851, he quit the Senate to run for governor of Mississippi under the new States’ Rights party. He lost but remained a successful plantation owner and Mississippi politician over the next few years. He was soon called out of retirement however when Franklin Pierce, the New Hampshire Democratic President, asked him to fill the Secretary of War’s cabinet position. Davis accepted and the whole family moved back to Washington. “Davis started out and remained a hands-on secretary, seeking involvement in all aspects of his department’s operations. A man as dedicated and as ambitious as Davis, who also had a vision of what he wanted to accomplish, could master the small domain of the antebellum US Army” (p. 249). Under Davis’ time as secretary, he increased the regular army and its pay while also increasing military technology (he is the one that moved the army into using new rifles with minie ball bullets, which would be so devastating a few years later during the civil war).

When Pierce did not win re-nomination for president, Davis was voted right back into the Senate in 1857. There he was almost powerless to stop the slide toward secession, even though he did not approve of it, and was forced in January 1861 to resign because his own state had seceded. Immediately he was made a Brigadier General in the CSA army but his own election as President of the Confederate States of America superseded it.

In February of 1861 in Montgomery, AL he took the oath of office as President and went about making a government. Soon they had written their own constitution and Davis even had his own cabinet, almost a mirror image of Lincoln’s government. An early problem cropped up when the state governors wanted to keep most of their enlisted men to guard the state instead of the new nation. Davis would have to contend against this attitude the entire existence of the Confederate States. Not only that but there were many significant differences between the North and the South that would dictate policy for Davis and his cabinet. “In 1860 the total population off the Confederate States was just over 9 million, while the Union total exceeded 22 million. In the most crucial category, white males aged eighteen to forty-five, the North enjoyed an advantage of around three to one. As it began its struggle for independence, the Confederacy commanded but 10 percent of the industrial capacity of the Union. In 1860, the North had produced over 90 percent of the country’s firearms, pig iron, locomotives, cloth, boots, and shoes. The Union also had twice the density of railroads per square mile, as well as considerably more mileage of canals and macadamized roads” (p. 350-51).

In 1861, Davis saw the purpose of his new government to be garnering foreign aid, multiplying military successes, and abolishing the Union blockade. While the South began the war quite well with many battlefield wins, the CSA would be plagued with incompetent generals throughout. Also with Great Britain ruling that the North’s blockade of the South was legal, the South began to run out of many essentials vital for life and war. Finally foreign backing became virtually non-existent as the South began to lose more battles, culminating in Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and the Emancipation Proclamation really sealed the deal. “’We commenced this war without preparation,’ Davis concluded, ‘and we must do the best we can with what we have’” (p. 376).

In 1863, the rampant inflation of the Confederate dollar along with the blockade caused Richmond’s ladies to riot for food. The Richmond Bread Riot ended after a few hours but it showed that the war effected everyone, on or off the battlefield. Through 1864 and into 1865, the North slowly demolished the Southern armies. Sherman took Atlanta and moved on to the Atlantic ocean, cutting Georgia, then South and North Carolina in two. Grant persisted in moving south to Richmond and while losing thousands of men, he also inflicted irreparable damage on Lee’s army. With Davis and the government evacuated from Richmond, Lee surrendered to Grant in April 1865. Davis then went on the lam, intending to ride to Florida to then take a boat to Texas where he would continue the fight. He and his family was apprehended by Northern troops in northern Florida though and taken back north near Washington DC and placed in Fortress Monroe.

Jefferson Davis, the once proud President of a doomed people, was then imprisoned for two years. President Johnson had issued several amnesties for the confederates but in all of them Jefferson was not pardoned. However, on May 11, 1867, Davis was released on bail where he and his wife, Varina, headed to Canada to see their children and then on to live in England. They would remain overseas for several years while the charges against Jefferson were eventually dropped. The US government realized that if they prosecuted Davis in court for treason and he was acquitted, they would lose face over the whole matter and people would ask what the purpose of the war had been.

Davis now had to take a good long look at his current life. Unfortunately, he and his family had absolutely no money and no prospects. The Union troops, after Vicksburg, had found Davis’ home, Brierfield, and torched it. Also the entire South was hurting so much that Davis found himself just one of many with no money and no job. He would spend the rest of his life trying to provide for his family through various means. Initially he took the job as president of the Carolina Life Insurance Company out of Memphis but he resigned in 1873 when he disagreed with them over their policies in merging with another company. He then wrote two hefty volumes detailing The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government and though popular, he never earned enough from their sale.

He remained a popular figure for the rest of his life and did speaking engagements every so often. Unfortunately he became increasingly prone to malarial attacks and with all the vagaries of his life, he felt unsettled and unhappy. Finally, a middle-aged lady, Sarah Dorsey, gave him her plantation house, Beauvoir, in which to retire and write his memoirs. He stayed there the rest of his life with Varina in a semi-happy retirement. On December 6, 1888, he died of acute bronchitis with malarial symptoms. He was 80 years old.

#16 Abraham Lincoln Part 2

“Out of the smoke and stench, out of the music and violet dreams of the war, Lincoln stood perhaps taller than any other of the many great heroes. This was in the mind of many. None threw a longer shadow than he. And to him the great hero was The People. He could not say too often that he was merely their instrument” (p. 735).

Although he had just lost the 1858 Senatorial election, Lincoln remained philosophical about it and simply moved his sights farther down the road to the 1860 presidential election instead. His team of men made sure that the Republican nomination convention would be held in Chicago and then they packed the place with thousands of Lincoln’s supporters. With many behind-the-scenes deals going on, Lincoln, after several ballots, managed to edge out all the leading Republican giants as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate. Meanwhile the Democratic Party had split; thus Lincoln would be running against Stephen Douglas, John Breckenridge, and John Bell.

Lincoln realized that the Republican Party was non-existent in the South and that the North contained the most electoral votes anyways, so he concentrated all the money and power of the Republican Party in the northern states alone. In the end, his scheme worked because he won every single northern state, except New Jersey but including California and Oregon. He had become the 16th President of the United States but with the sanction of only half the country. “Fifteen states gave him no electoral votes; in ten states of the South he didn’t get a count of one popular vote. He was the most sectionally elected President the nation had ever had and the fact would be dinned into his ears” (p. 183).

The South was horrified and it was all dominoes from there. South Carolina, always the hotbed of radicalism, immediately seceded after Lincoln’s victory, shortly to be followed by Florida, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. At once, they took over all forts, armories, and other governmental buildings for their own use. Lincoln was not even officially president yet and already the country was falling to pieces. He was finally inaugurated on March 4, 1861 and it would still be another month before he would be able to deal with the situation. Or should I say…it was a month later when the situation became too noticeable to ignore. Around the first of April, Lincoln received word that the men at Fort Sumter in South Carolina would starve if help from the North did not arrive soon. On April 12th, when Navy ships did try to aid Fort Sumter, South Carolina fired upon them and the call to war commenced. (Fort Sumter eventually fell to the South.) On April 15th, Lincoln called for troops, while on that same day, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas followed the other seceded states, eventually forming the Confederate States of America with Jefferson Davis as President.

The very first battle of the war took place in Manassas, VA only a few miles from Washington and thus providing the North high expectations of success. “The Battle of Bull Run, Sunday, July 21, 1861, was to a large and eager public a sort of sporting event, the day and place of combat announced beforehand, a crowd of spectators riding to the scene with lunch baskets as though for a picnic” (p. 252). The picnic did not last, however, the South won this battle and the Northern army turned into a rout. It was very rough for the North in the first few months of the war, especially since most Northerners believed that the war would only last a few months at the most.

Amidst the general gloom and disillusionment of the unsuccessful North, Lincoln had to deal with his own personal tragedy. In February of 1862, Willie, Lincoln’s favorite son, caught a fever and died at only eleven years old. “He [Lincoln] lifted the cover from the face of his child, gazed at it long, and murmured, ‘It is hard, hard, hard to have him die!’” (p. 290). “Among letters of condolence that had come was one, softhearted and sincere, from ex-President Pierce, mentioning that he too had once lost a boy he loved and could understand the grief” (p. 291). I have to admit here that my heart also softened towards Pierce by his tremendous show of basic humanity to a grieving Lincoln.

A major effort was underway in the first year of the war to keep the border states, i.e. Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, out of the South’s hands by whatever means available. The North was successful in commandeering these states to their cause but it also helped that Lincoln created another state as a buffer too. In 1862, “Congress passed an act making West Virginia a state, seceding her from Virginia” (p. 339). This was a brilliant move not only because it made Washington safer but also because it gave the North (and took away from the South) men and land.

Things were going poorly for the North and consequently for Lincoln as well. He had been infected with a rash of incompetent major generals, including McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, and Pope, who, although the North had more men and supplies, seemed to lose every encounter with the enemy. It was frustrating—from the Battle of Seven Pines, to the 2nd Battle of Bull Run, to Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville—all Union losses. I think it says something about the fragility of the North’s situation that when Lincoln had to find a victory in which to offer the world the Emancipation Proclamation, he had to settle for Antietam (1862), which was basically a draw. Lincoln finally settled on promoting Ulysses S Grant over the Western army, leading the siege of Vicksburg, and when Robert E Lee made a pass at Pennsylvania, Lincoln appointed George Meade as head of the Army of the Potomac.

It was the summer of 1863 and things were about to change dramatically for the North, although it would take them a while to realize it. At Gettysburg in Pennsylvania on July 1st, Lee stumbled upon a regiment of the Union army and opened fire. Instead of finding a better position, Lee stayed where he was while eleven Union corps came up to defend Missionary Ridge. After 3 days of intense and bloody fighting, Lee realized he could not win this fight and on July 4th, the Union army found their foes gone. On the other side of the country, July 4th heralded another Union victory when Vicksburg, bastion of the Confederate forces on the Mississippi River, surrendered unconditionally to Grant.

It was in late November of that same year when Lincoln would make a most surprising little speech at the dedication ceremony for the new military cemetery at Gettysburg. After sitting through a rousing 2 hour speech by Edward Everett, Lincoln got up and spoke for exactly three minutes.
“Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation—or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated—can long endure.
We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of those who have given their lives that this nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or to detract.
The world will very little note nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated, here, to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation all, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” (p. 444-45).

1863 not only saw these exciting Union victories but also draft riots in New York City, the first annual Thanksgiving Day celebration set for the last Thursday of November, the Capitol Building being finished with the statue “Armed Freedom” placed on top of the dome, the Republican Party briefly changing its name to the “National Union” Party to accommodate Democrats, and a host of popular, bestselling Abraham Lincoln joke books!

1864 saw even more changes for the North. It was an election year and in the history of the world, no nation had ever held an election in the midst of a civil war. We, Americans, would change that. Lincoln’s job was by no means a sure thing so it was important that the North keep on winning. With this end in view, he brought Grant over to wage the war against Robert E Lee in the Eastern theater, while Sherman was promoted over the West. Grant then decided on a many-pronged attack against the South that lead Sherman to Atlanta on one end while Grant would engage Lee at the other. Also it was presidential nomination time! The Democrats nominated George McClellan, former general, to head their presidential ticket while Lincoln, although he was not the politicians’ favorite, got the Republican nomination. However, in this year of changes, his previous running mate, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, would be swapped out for Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. Lincoln stated that there were two reasons for this change: 1. Johnson was a powerful War Democrat and would appeal to those voters and 2. He was from the South and that was important for unity.

The war effort though seemed to stall. Grant fought Lee in about six horrendously bloody and costly battles all the way to the gates of Petersburg where he then sat in a siege. Then Sherman who had victoriously marched through as many battles from Chattanooga saw a defeat at Kennesaw Mountain and then sat down in front of Atlanta to wait. But with the ’64 election closing in, Lincoln needed action. Sherman finally defeated Johnston and after accidentally burning much of Atlanta, he lost contact with the world as he headed east to Savannah, destroying all he could find on the way. Almost a month later after totally silence, Lincoln finally had word that Sherman was successful—he had reached the coast! Lincoln was then reelected for a second term.

Lincoln then put forward Amendment #13 that would abolish slavery, while Grant moved forward and threatened Richmond. On Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, hounded and driven out of Richmond, with Sherman coming up from the south, Lee surrendered to Grant at the Appomattox State Court House. Lincoln was delighted and asked the band to play “Dixie” to the shock of all. “I propose closing up this interview by the band performing a particular tune…I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever heard” (p. 691).

Even though he was swamped with the new work of capitulation of the South and reconstruction of the Union, Lincoln made time on Good Friday, April 14, 1865 to spend time with his wife, Mary, and another couple, Clara Smith and Henry Rathbone, by going to seeing the play, Our American Cousin. It was a mediocre play and Lincoln did not really want to go but the theater had already published the fact that he would be there. At a certain point in the middle of play while everyone was laughing, John Wilkes Booth slipped into the President’s unguarded box and shot him with a short-range Derringer pistol behind the left ear. “For Abraham Lincoln it is lights out, good night, farewell—and a long farewell to the good earth and its trees, its enjoyable companions, and the Union of States and the world Family of Man he has loved” (p. 709). The President slumped forward, while Henry moved to block Boothe from escaping. Booth, however, also had a knife and he stabbed at Rathbone. After that, he jumped from the box onto the stage, broke his leg, and disappeared out the back entrance on his own horse. He would be caught and killed 12 days later at a farm in Virginia.

Lincoln was not dead though. There were several army doctors in the house that night and they got Lincoln out of the theater to a boardinghouse across the street. All the doctors agreed on one thing though—Lincoln would not survive the bullet to the brain. He never regained consciousness and when the sun arose the next morning, Abraham Lincoln died. “The Pale Horse had come. To a deep river, to a far country, to a by-and-by whence no man returns, had gone the child of Nancy Hanks and Tom Lincoln, the wilderness boy who found far lights and tall rainbows to live by, whose name ever before he died had become a legend inwoven with men’s struggle for freedom the world over” (p. 716).

It was now, after Lincoln had died, that his reputation grew and multiplied into what no one could see while he lived. “Now began the vast epic tale of the authentic Lincoln tradition mingled with legend, myth, folklore. Believers and atheists, those of fixed doctrine or the freethinkers—both were to argue he was theirs…Some had one sweeping claim: ‘He was humanity.’” (p. 732).

#16: Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

“With the thoughts you’d be thinkin’
You could be another Lincoln
If you only had a brain.”—Wizard of Oz

I’ve always been particularly fond of Lincoln. Granted I grew up in the North, but the very vanilla information that I’ve garnered about him over the years has only increased my admiration. In fact, as an art project in 2nd grade, I drew a remarkable likeness of him and the teacher admired it so much that she printed my portrait of Abraham Lincoln in a special art edition of the school bulletin. (As a side note, I’ve never been able to recreate my initial success as a budding artist and perforce, can only produce a nominally decent stick figure.)

Honestly though, one of the many motives for my PRP was to read about Lincoln. Let’s pull a Ghost-of-Christmas-Past act and watch Vanya about a year ago when reading Manhunt: The Twelve Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer by James Swanson. Again this book was a “gift” so to speak. In reality my dad was cleaning house and he sent me about a half dozen books that he had already read and thought that I might like. (Coincidentally, in this package I also received His Excellency, the book on George Washington that I would later use to start my PRP.) Now I did not really care for Manhunt. The author did a good job of recreating John Wilkes Booth’s actions in the days before and after the assassination and his character analyses of the accomplices are interesting and original. But...not only did I find Swanson’s flights of fancy regarding Booth’s thoughts and the godawful length of the book frustrating but I found myself longing to read more about Lincoln while he was still alive. It was then that I discovered how little I really knew about our 16th president. All I knew about Lincoln’s life could probably summed up on one double-spaced sheet of paper and who knows if any of it was even true!

This book really got me thinking. Did I really know that much about any of the presidents? What about the ones in my own lifetime? The truth was scary and yet, I think, a testimony to the perversity of social studies pedagogy in our nation’s school system.

Anyways, now is not the time to soapbox my opinions on how history is so tragically taught to our children in school, but as a proud fan of “history” in general, I was appalled at my lack of knowledge in an area that affects me on a pretty regular basis (every four years, if you must know.) Of course, this was not the only reason I started the PRP (please read my first blog if you wish to know the rest) but since we’ve made it to Lincoln I feel that I must include these extra reasons as well. Now, maybe, you also can fathom the happiness that I felt upon delicately opening Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years by Carl Sandburg (Harcourt, Inc: San Diego, 1939).

In choosing Carl Sandburg’s famed biography, I did quite a bit of research first. With Lincoln my frustration was due, unlike so many other presidents, to the vast amount of literature to be had on the subject. It seems like everybody and their grandmothers wanted to write their own version of Abraham Lincoln’s life story, culminating in the first ever assassination of an American President. But I wasn’t convinced. I went right to Amazon.Com and began reading review after review and realized that though Carl Sandburg’s book was rather dated and a freakin’ behemoth, it was still rated as one of the top Lincoln biographies ever. Well that was enough for me and best yet, it was at my local library!

The Lincolns originated from the Shenandoah Valley but Thomas Lincoln, Abe’s father, uprooted his wife and small daughter and moved them all to Kentucky. And that, dear folks, is where little Abraham was born. “Whatever the exact particulars, the definite event on that 12th of February, 1809, was the birth of a boy they named Abraham after his grandfather who had been killed by Indians—born in silence and pain from a wilderness mother on a bed of perhaps cornhusks and perhaps hen feathers—with perhaps a laughing child prophecy that he would ‘never come to much’” (p. 8).

In December of 1816, the whole family picked up again and moved to Indiana. Sadly, only 2 years later, Abraham’s mother, Nancy, died of the milk sickness (where the tongue apparently turned white). “So Nancy Hanks Lincoln died, 34 years old, a pioneer sacrifice, with memories of monotonous, endless everyday chores, of mystic Bible verses read over and over for their promises, of blue wistful hills and a summer when the crab-apple blossoms flamed white and she carried a boy child into the world” (p. 12). Only a year later, Thomas Lincoln remarried a widow, Sarah Bush Johnson, who would become a good and kind influence on Abraham. “His stepmother was a rich silent force in his life” (p. 16).

Growing up on a farm in the wilderness, Abraham learned to do everything needful, but he was never known as a great worker; he preferred books. In fact, he once stated “My father taught me to work but he never taught me to love it.” He was never very handsome either. In an age where the average man was 5’8”, Abraham grew to 6’4”. He was tall, gawky and his clothes never, ever fit properly, leaving his ankles and wrists perpetually exposed. On top of all this, Abraham had never any formal schooling. He went to a local school for a time, enough to learn to read, but thereafter was too busy working. In the end, he simply taught himself by books that he borrowed.

In 1828, his sister, Sarah, died in childbirth. Abraham then took a job as a flatboat operator, hauling pigs down the Mississippi River to New Orleans to be sold. When he returned home, he found that his family was getting ready to move to Illinois where he joined them as well. It was in Illinois, that he gave his very first political speech. “He had been delivering speeches to trees, stumps, rows of corn and potatoes, just practicing, by himself. But when two legislative candidates spoke at a campaign meeting in front of Renshaw’s store in Decatur, Abraham stepped up and advocated improvement of the Sangamon River for better navigation” (p. 21).

The very next year, Abe moved away from his family to the town of New Salem, Il. There he was to become a store clerk, gaining a far-reaching reputation as an honest and reliable man. Abraham also had taken to reading legal books and even performing some small legal offices for people, including deeds, wills, and other services. It was only to be expected, then, that his name be discussed as a possible candidate for the Illinois legislature.

Unfortunately though at that very moment in 1832, the Black Hawk War burst upon the scene and the local militia was called up as reinforcements for General Zachary Taylor. A group of men from New Salem banded together to form a regiment and they elected Abraham Lincoln as their captain. He and his regiment did not see much fighting but they walked long weary hours through every kind of weather. Instead of returning home after his enlistment ended, Lincoln reenlisted another two times. “In those days Lincoln had seen deep into the heart of the American volunteer soldier, why men go to war, march in mud, sleep in rain on cold ground, eat pork raw when it can’t be boiled, and kill when the killing is good” (p. 32).

In 1834, he was finally elected to the state legislature, where he proceeded to shine. “One lobbyist noted Lincoln in this legislature as ‘raw-boned, angular, features deeply furrowed, ungraceful, almost uncouth…and yet there was a magnetism and dash about the man that made him a universal favorite” (p. 44). When the legislature was not in session though, Lincoln had been hired as a surveyor for the state. He spent his time between the state legislature and when it was not in session, travelling for his surveying job. His daily existence remained much this way until 1836 when he took and passed the bar examination. Abraham Lincoln had become a lawyer.

After his successful entry into this new profession, Lincoln moved to the state capital of Springfield to become a partner in a law firm. It was here in Springfield that Lincoln met Mary Todd, whom he married on November 4, 1842. His new wife was very ambitious politically but she had to bide her time because Abraham was merely a simple country lawyer. She had her husband keep his hand in the local Whig machinery by having him travel the state electioneering for various other individuals. Through one thing and another, Abraham Lincoln’s name became quite well known among the political elite of Illinois.

As the United States declared war on Mexico, Illinois sent Abraham Lincoln as its representative to the United States Congress. Since he was a Whig and the Whigs liked to rotate representatives every term, Lincoln was only in Washington one term and then he was heading back home to Springfield. In 1849, he was offered a position of Secretary to the Territory of Oregon but he declined the position.

As the Whigs faded into the background of the political spectrum, Lincoln did not immediately jump on the Republican bandwagon. Republicanism began as a direct result of slavery in the states and was, almost from the start, a truly sectional party. However, since he had been a Whig for almost his entire political life and disliked slavery, he found himself a Republican almost without realizing it. In fact, Lincoln became so popular in the newly-created Republican Party that he even received some votes in the Republican National Presidential Convention of 1856.

But Lincoln could no more stay away from politics than a starving man from food. “The political letters of Lincoln early in 1858 showed more and more a rare skill in the management of men” (p. 137). He began to hone his political platform by officially speaking out against the institution of slavery. It is generally accepted that Lincoln’s “House Divided” Speech (where he said that no house can stand against itself, referencing slavery) caught the public interest and got his name out to a more national audience.

The “House Divided” speech, though, was just an appetizer. Lincoln really reached a higher level of national popularity and recognition from a brilliant plan that his team formulated to promulgate his name. The 1858 Senate race was to be contested between Abraham Lincoln, Republican lawyer and backcountry farm boy, and Stephen A. Douglas, political wunderkind and Democratic urbanite. Stephen Douglas had known Lincoln for years (they both practiced law in Springfield) and both held each other in high regard. However, Douglas had been actively engaged in politics for decades before Lincoln was ever elected to any position. For example, Douglas, also known as the “Little Giant,” had penned the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act when he chaired the Senate committee on Territories.

The daring plan to get their man elected to the Senate essentially had Lincoln ask Douglas if he would be willing to hold a number of debates throughout the state. Douglas agreed and over several weeks, went head-to-head with Abraham Lincoln on the issues of that day. Lincoln was clever though. He used everything that Douglas said against him, without it appearing that way. Slavery was the most hotly contested issue between them and Lincoln used it to trap Douglas into saying that slavery should be ended. This tiny statement by Douglas would severely hurt his chances of being nominated the presidential candidate by the Democratic Party in 1860.

In the end, Lincoln failed to be elected to the US Senate and instead Douglas went on to Washington. However, people took notice of the lanky, intelligent lawyer from Illinois who had beat Douglas in the popular vote but lost with the electors. What no one could have imagined would be the effect of the printed word in these men’s futures. The Lincoln men put together a little booklet of all the debates and through this medium, Lincoln’s name shone across the nation as an up-and-coming political star.

“Lincoln was 51 years old. With each year since he had become a grown man, his name and ways, and stories about him, had been spreading among the plain people and their children. So tall and so bony, with so peculiar a slouch and so easy a saunter, so sad and so haunted-looking, so quizzical and comic, as if hiding a lantern that lighted and went out and then he lighted it again—he was the Strange Friend and the Friendly Stranger. Like something out of a picture book for children—he was. His form of slumping arches and his face of gaunt sockets were a shape a Great Artist had scrawled from careless clay.

“He looked like an original plan for an extra-long horse or a lean tawny buffalo, that a Changer had suddenly whisked into a man-shape. Or he met the eye as a clumsy, mystical giant that had walked out of a Chinese or Russian fairy story, or a bogy who had stumbled out of an ancient Saxon myth with a handkerchief full of presents he wanted to divide among all the children in the world.

“He didn’t wear clothes. Rather, clothes hung upon him as if on a rack to dry, or on a loose ladder up a windswept chimney. His clothes, to keep the chill or the sun off, seemed to whisper ‘He put us on when he was thinking about something else.’

“He dressed any which way at times, in broadcloth, a silk hat, a silk choker, and a flaming red silk handkerchief, so that one court clerk said Lincoln was ‘fashionably dressed, as neatly attired as any lawyer at court, except Ward Lamon.’ Or again, people said Lincoln looked like a huge skeleton with skin over the bones, and clothes covering the skin.

“There could have been times when children and dreamers looked at Abraham Lincoln and lazily drew their eyelids half shut and let their hearts roam about him—and they half-believed him to be a tall horse chestnut tree or a rangy horse or a big wagon or a log barn full of new-mown hay—something else or more than a man, a lawyer, a Republican candidate with principles, a prominent citizen—something spreading, elusive, and mysterious—the Strange Friend and Friendly Stranger” (p. 146-47).

To be continued…

Lincoln for President

Lincoln for President: An Unlikely Candidate, An Audacious Strategy,
And the Victory No One Saw Coming
By Bruce Chadwick
(Sourcebooks, Inc: Naperville, IL, 2009)

This is certainly not the biography for Lincoln that I chose to read, however it was a Christmas/birthday present from my father and so I’ve included it in my PRP (Presidential Reading Project). Besides, Lincoln’s a Biggie, if you know what I mean and so I felt safe including an extra book about him (just like I did with Andrew Jackson. So just deal with it.) After reading so many biographies of unknown presidents, it’s an absolute pleasure to finally get to old Honest Abe. Besides, upon receiving this book, I was curious to see how this historian, any historian, could write an entire book about one single presidential campaign.

Let’s find out, shall we?

What I immediately liked about this book was the detailed and informative picture of Lincoln that is drawn from numerous contemporary sources and friends of his, prior to the election of 1860. I think that most people today know what Lincoln looks like primarily because his image is simply everywhere. The craggy face, the aura of sadness, the stovepipe hat, the rail-thin body. If you haven’t grown up familiar with Mount Rushmore or the Lincoln Memorial or a freaking penny for crissakes then I’m guessing that you’re not from around these parts.

Although we grew up Knowing About Lincoln, we’ve never seen the Lincoln of the 1850s back before he was a national figure or anybody in particular really. Noah Brooks, an audience member for Lincoln’s Cooper Union (NY) speech said “When Lincoln rose to speak, I was greatly disappointed. He was tall—oh, how tall! And so angular and awkward that I had, for an instant, a feeling of pity for so ungainly a man. His clothes were black and ill fitting, badly wrinkled—as if they had been jammed carelessly into a small trunk. His bushy head, with the stiff black hair thrown back, was balanced on a long and lean head stalk, and when he raised his hands in an opening gesture, I noticed that they were very large” (p. 3). Of course, I had to laugh but Lincoln’s appearance made a perfect foil for his public-speaking and politicking, which just happened to be mesmerizing and wonderful. I appreciated getting a good look at the younger Abe Lincoln right from the start of the book, just as the Republican National Convention of 1860 comes into view.

I have to say that I am really impressed with the way Lincoln’s team worked to get their relatively-unheard of politician to eclipse the big wigs of that day—William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Simon Cameron. The election of 1860 was supposed to be the apogee of William Seward's career, who had been a prominent NY politician for decades. (You may remember him for his rivalry with fellow New Yorker, Millard Fillmore). But Lincoln and his team of faithful friends planned in advance for their boy to lead the Republican ticket. For example, they worked to get the Nomination Convention to be held in Chicago, IL for the first time. Chicago was still a little town at this time, but they knew that if Lincoln was to even stand a chance then he needed to have home field advantage. Then on the night before the convention, the Lincoln team had a Good Idea. The tickets for the convention were parceled out evenly between all the candidates and their supporters but Lincoln’s team replicated tickets and handed them out to pro-Lincoln men, telling them to be at the Wigwam (the place where the convention would be held) early the next morning. The Lincoln fans showed up early and were seated. That meant that there was no room for any other candidate’s supporters and the Lincoln fans cheered every time his name was mentioned.

Lincoln, of course, won the nomination. Seward, on the first ballot, won the most votes but he did not have the requisite two-thirds majority. Some men switched to Lincoln on the next ballot, then more on the next, and finally the vote landslided in Lincoln’s favor. There was a lot of behind-the-scenes maneuvering and I find it extremely interesting that most of the men that Lincoln ran against at the convention were later to be found in his Cabinet, allowing us to assume that promises had been made for votes. “”None of Lincoln’s team ever admitted they actually offered cabinet posts to any of the state leaders or, later, to William Seward in the middle of the campaign. But when Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, Simon Cameron became secretary of war, Seward was named secretary of state, Chase secretary of the treasury, Smith secretary of the interior, Bates attorney general, and Montgomery Blair postmaster general” (p. 84).

All the minutiae of the election is included in this book, including bios on all the major candidates, the split of the Democratic party, the campaign strategies for all the parties, and finally the actual electioneering for the candidates. The election of 1860 is unusual for a variety of reasons. First of all, the Democratic Party split and at one time there were 5 men in the race for the presidency, including Sam Houston. The Democrats split along sectional lines with Stephen Douglas garnering the northern vote, John Breckenridge getting the southern vote, and John Bell heading the newly formed Constitutional Union Party, which was compose of “disgruntled Southern Democrats, old-line Whigs, transformed Know-Nothings, and hundreds of former public officials and political figures” (p. 38). Secondly, there was talk of secession if Lincoln was elected president and so Lincoln decided on a bold strategy: he would only campaign in the Northern states.

When I say that Lincoln would campaign, I meant that figuratively. No politician in this age ever campaigned for themselves. In Lincoln’s case, he was completely mute from the moment that he was selected as the Republican nominee until after he was elected president of the United States. His team of men did all the talking, promising and campaigning for him while he sat at home in Springfield, IL awaiting results. However, Lincoln was the principle decision-maker of the group and the sheer number of his letters to his team amply proves it. Lincoln made the decision that he would pour all the Republican money and time into the Northern states alone. Since he knew that he would not win any Southern states, he recognized that to win the 1860 election, he would need every single Northern state. And so he morphed his campaign to take into account the already splintered country.

The Republicans also came up with a diverse party platform that would not merely focus on slavery, like the Democratic one. Instead, the Republicans used the corruption of the Buchanan presidency as a springboard against political corruption across the country. They also focused on promoting the Homestead Act (which aided new farmers on the frontier), a transcontinental railroad, and tariff reform (so important to iron workers in Pennsylvania).

Lincoln’s bold strategy worked but his success was also due to the split Democratic vote. “The Southern Democratic races were marred by endless mudslinging, and managers of both were unable to focus on Lincoln” (p. 221). Amazingly, Lincoln won in every Northern state, including California and Oregon. But the big prize was New York with its 34 electoral votes that sealed the deal. Thus, in November of 1860, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was elected the 16th President of the United States. He was also the very first Republican president ever and ushered in 24 years of Republican rule.

I enjoyed learning more about the causes of the war and indeed there is a whole chapter worth reading about the secessionist view of slavery. A popular misconception of the time in the minds of Northerners was that if slavery was abolished, the non-slaveholding Southern population would join the North in an uprising, thereby producing some sort of balance in the country. However, Chadwick’s research showed that most Southern people, slaveholding or not, were interested in supporting the institution of slavery. The reasons were varied. For the poorer Southern man, he supported slavery because he did not want the slaves, if they were emancipated, to take his job, plus the prosperity of the plantations would trickle down to him eventually. Plus, men, like doctors or merchants who didn’t own slaves, had patients and customers that did and so they supported slavery as well. I thought this chapter was quite unique on an economic standpoint and as a later cause for war.

Although the book is about Lincoln’s triumph and there were a lot of little things I didn’t know, I can’t say that I would recommend this book as light reading, if you know what I mean. The book is over 360 pages, which I thought was really quite long for the subject, and sometimes I felt like the author was padding the chapters. For instance, Bruce Chadwick includes what I felt was every single letter Lincoln received during the campaign and every single warning about Lincoln’s safety. Some of the chapters got completely bogged down for me because it seemed like Chadwick didn’t have the courage to leave out some information. I know that there was tons of material to work with relating to the election of 1860 and its ramifications but I think a truly good author knows how to edit. Not every source needs to be used, not every piece of information about the subject must be included. I’m just saying.

Also the author repeated himself, which drove me crazy considering the length of the book. He would mention something in the first chapter and then again, the same thing with the same wording in a later chapter. Urgh! It was frustrating because I don’t have that bad a memory! Finally, Chadwick uses rhetorical questions like there was a Rhetorical-Question-Fire-Sale going on and he bought everything at a greatly reduced price. Honestly, he throws those things around as if he were writing a cheap mystery-thriller. Many chapters ended tawdrily with inane rhetorical questions, presumably to hook us into turning the page. Here’s one: “They did everything a shrewd campaign team should have done. But would it be enough” (p. 157)? “Lincoln, they believed, could not win. Or could he” (p. 116)? It makes me want to hear a melodramatic organ dum-dum-duming after the question mark. What about this? “Could they [Republican] keep their fragile alliance with the Know-Nothings as the election turned more and more on slavery? Could they make any dents in the steel belt of southern counties along the Maryland and Virginia borders that repeatedly went Democratic and would be targeted by Breckenridge? Could they beat both Douglas and Breckenridge, plus political history, all the same time” (p. 191)? Dum-Dum-Dum! And I’m pretty sure that’s a run-on question in the middle of all that madness. But the best was yet to come…

“ Would the razor-thin margins of victory Lincoln’s polls predicted hold up throughout the long night? A shift of just a few thousand votes in one or two states could cost him the election, and the vote appeared to be that close in several states, especially in the Northwest. Could he carry New York? The latest telegram from Thurlow Weed, that he had hid from everyone but his wife, indicated he might not. Could the Bell, Douglas, and Breckenridge men carry even just one large Northern state, plus a small one, and in so doing, toss the election into the House of Representatives? Would his massive voter registration drive attract enough new voters to the Republican banner to give him a cushion of brand-new votes needed to carry states where the race was supposed to be very close? Would his North-only strategy backfire on him” (p. 300)?

You have got to be kidding me!?! At each question, I want to scream “No, goddamn it” and then punch the author in the face. Chadwick makes it seem like we don’t know the end of this story when most 3rd graders can tell you that Lincoln won that election. It’s like the Titanic movie, quite beautiful and moving but in reality, we all know how it’s going to end.

#15: James Buchanan Part 2

“To many he [James Buchanan] seemed half apparition, ready for the graveclothes that would swathe a past epoch.” Carl Sandburg

Cool Stuff about James Buchanan
1. He never had to shave. “Buchanan was a prize local catch with his handsome, whiskerless face (Buchanan never had to shave), blond hair, and six foot frame…” (p. 19).
2. Buchanan had odd-looking eyes. “To compensate for a defect in his eyes, Buchanan characteristically leaned his head forward and cocked it to one side. He did this not only because he suffered from wandering eyes—what ophthalmologists today call exodeviation—but because he was also nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other. Some observers thought he looked as if he had a stiff neck; others found it an attractive mannerism that made him appear intensely interested in every conversation” (p. 19).
3. Buchanan was a bachelor his entire life (the only president to do so) but he was engaged at one point to a lovely little thing, Ann Coleman. Ann eventually broke the engagement and though the reasons are not clear (apparently he worked too much and was also seeing another lady), she was upset enough for her mother to send her to Philadelphia to recuperate. Instead, the young girl ended up dying, some said of a broken heart. “Soon her mother had rushed her off to recover in Philadelphia, where, inexpicably, this previously healthy twenty-three-year-old died suddenly of what one doctor diagnosed as ‘hysterical convulsions’” (p. 20).
4. Due to a number of reasons, Buchanan was regularly labeled as a homosexual, contemporarily and historically. It did not help that he was a lifelong bachelor and preferred male company to female. He also had a femininity about him that caused tongues to wag. “Referring to his femininity, Andrew Jackson once called him an ‘Aunt Nancy’” (p. 25). “On the basis of slender evidence, mostly the circumstance of his bachelorhood and three asides by contemporaries about his effeminacy, Buchanan has been dubbed America’s first homosexual president” (p. 25).
5. Buchanan was the first to take the term “First Lady” and apply it to the current woman in the White House. Because Buchanan never married, he needed to go elsewhere to find a female hostess for all his parties and so he used his sister’s daughter, Harriet Lane. “When Buchanan moved to the White House in March 1857, Harriet Lane became his first lady, so designated in the first use of that term because she was not his wife, but rather his official lady and hostess” (p. 48).
6. I love that Buchanan’s followers named themselves the “Buchaneers.” Ha! “Politicians and civil servants who had long observed the abuses of American politics believed that Buchanan’s Buchaneers—the inner circle of friends and members of his administration—had reached unacceptable levels in terms of the use of public authority and funds for private and party profit” (p. 113).
7. Buchanan won the presidential election of 1856 but this was also the first election in which the Republican Party ran a candidate, John C. Fremont.
8. One of the domestic issues that Buchanan had to deal with during his presidency was the Mormon question in Utah. The Mormons at this time considered Utah as their own personal property, whereas Buchanan was trying to bring it into the Union as a state. Led by Brigham Young, the Mormons resorted to massive amounts of violence to keep the federal officials out of their territory, even so far as committing the worst civilian massacre in American history. “In September 1857 a group of emigrants from Arkansas—en route to California—discovered the danger when Young and his militia were responsible for the worst civilian atrocity in U.S. history. One hundred and twenty-five pioneers were murdered in Mountain Meadows, Utah, in an act that until recently was blamed on the Paiute Indians, but in which the Mormon militia participated and which Brigham Young covered up” (p. 91).
9. Due to the unprecedented evidence of blatant corruption in Buchanan’s administration, the Republicans in the House established a committee to investigate these abuses. “The focus was on the practices used by the president and his cabinet to pass the Lecompton constitution, but soon a wider net was cast. The administration’s use of patronage came under investigation, as did payroll taxes levied on patronage holders at election time, changes in post office personnel, bribing voters, and especially granting lucrative government printing contracts to supporters, who then returned a portion of their profits to the party” (p. 113). People were horrified at the indecent level of corruption in their government but instead of impeaching him, the Congress decided to wait just a little longer for Buchanan’s natural term to end.
10. John Updike, the famous author, did his part to avenge Buchanan’s life from his critics. “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 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” (p. 147).

Well, I can safely say that Jean Baker is most certainly not a fan of James Buchanan. I feel that she does truly try to remain unbiased but Buchanan’s penchant for bad decisions doesn’t help his case at all and ties her hands somewhat. However, on page 5 she gives us her intentions upon writing this biography and it reads along as if she was against Buchanan from the start. “The book seeks to suggest some of the reasons for Buchanan’s failure and specifically to explain the gap between Buchanan’s experience and training before his presidency and his lamentable performance in office, during which, tone-deaf to the kind of compromises that might have fulfilled his intentions, he blundered on with policies that undermined his goals” (p. 5).

I also found Buchanan a very sad case. After reading 15 presidential biographies, I’ve come to realize that it almost makes no difference who the man was before his election—it only matters what he does with the power once he has it. Buchanan is a prime example of this—he is a relatively savvy lawyer and politician before becoming president and then he turns right around and makes every conceivable mistake once he is president. It’s amazing! I have to admit that reading about Buchanan’s presidency made my heart hurt. It was just like a train wreck in that it was too hard to stop reading but in hindsight it is quite easy to see all the various places he could have made better decisions. And it’s not like Buchanan made one, gigantic error—what is so painful about his story are all the little moments, two paths diverged in a wood if you will, in which he took the road less traveled by. And that has made all the difference…and not in a good way.

I also feel that there is a reason the Civil War began just as he was sliding out the door. Although Abe’s election was the spark that started the Southern stampede to secede (it rhymes!), I really believe that if Buchanan had pulled an Andrew Jackson and nipped that shit in the bud then Lincoln wouldn’t have been stuck with such a mess. “To study Buchanan is to consider why the American Civil War, unthinkable a decade before, became inevitable, why northern Democrats behaved the way they did during the war; and why secessionist southerners, at first a minority in the Confederacy, carried the day” (p. 6-7).

Buchanan also seemed remarkably obtuse when it came to gauging his own northern constituency. Baker has already made it quite clear that Buchanan was very, very pro-southern in his political leanings—“Both physically and politically, he had only one farsighted eye, and it looked southward” (p. 73)—but he was also vehemently anti-Republican, anti-abolitionist. Buchanan, it appears, had a truly myopic approach to political labels and failed to read the times. He believed that abolitionists were complete fanatics, ready to tear the Union apart, and that Republicans were worse even than that. “In his years as president, Buchanan did a great deal to popularize the view that the Republicans were a threat to the South, thereby encouraging its secession from the Union when Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860” (p. 73). This is a hard truth indeed—it seems that on every possible level Buchanan lead the country closer to the brink of war.

I just want to say that on my part I was merely sad when I read this book. Whatever his failings as president, Buchanan, like all US Presidents, was given unlimited possibilities to use his power for the good of his people and to uphold the Constitution, which he vowed to do. And what is so sad to me is that he did neither.

#15 James Buchanan (1791-1868)

Oddly enough, my first real impression of James Buchanan came from the book on Andrew Jackson. In that book, the author mentions that Buchanan had a high, nasally voice which Henry Clay, famous compromiser and eminent politician, loved to mimic behind his back. Classic! I love hearing little tidbits like that because it makes history so current, don’t you think? I mean what’s more universal than making fun of other people?

Obviously since Jackson, I’ve run across Buchanan quite a bit and can see his influence as a senator from Pennsylvania, the Secretary of State under Polk and even the Ambassador to Great Britain (which I will cover later) pervade numerous presidential biographies. What interests me the most is the fact that Buchanan is regularly listed in the Top Five Most Hated Presidents. Whoa—I already know that Buchanan was the president right before the Civil War but what on earth did he do to fall so low? The author, Jean Baker of James Buchanan: American Presidents Series (Times Books: New York, 2004), weighs in on this circumstance as well. “Four years later Buchanan left the presidency in disgrace, condemned by Republicans, vilified by northern Democrats and dismissed even by the southerners whom he had tried so hard to please and whose personal affection he craved” (p. 2). She then follows that up with “By ever measure except his own—whether that of his contemporaries or historians—Buchanan was an abysmal failure as chief executive” (p.3).

I have a couple of good friends from Pennsylvania that keep asking me about Buchanan and what kind of president he was. I am sad to say that it does not look too hopeful but let’s find out if the critics are correct about James Buchanan.

He was born in 1790 to a family who owned a local trading post in southern Pennsylvania. James was the oldest son of eleven and had an undisputed position of power within the family. There is not much information about James’ upbringing and childhood but in 1807, he was sent to Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. He was known for being a follower rather than a leader and was even expelled from school because he was a part of a gang of unruly, drunken boys. “It was not the expulsion that is surprising, but rather Buchanan’s insistence in his unfinished autobiography that he was not ‘dissipated’ himself, but had drunk, roistered, and disturbed in order to be considered ‘a clever and spirited youth.’” (p. 13). Through his family connections, he was eventually reinstated but he harbored a hatred for Dickinson ever afterward.

After graduation, he promptly moved to Lancaster, PA and took up law. “Even as a neophyte, James Buchanan sought high-profile cases that brought prominence, more clients, and larger fees in a circular process that made him, before he was thirty-five, one of the best-known lawyers in southern Pennsylvania” (p. 16). Even though his law career was blossoming, Buchanan was drawn to politics and in 1814 was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly as a Federalist.

Then in 1820 his political career began in full with the first of five consecutive terms in the United States Congress (he was elected right after the Missouri Compromise was passed). During this time, his political leanings began to favor the ascendant Democratic Party under Andrew Jackson while his political friendships veered toward the South. His pro-southern leanings would eventually color his entire presidency and would become an issue in the incipient Civil War. He would remain a politician who fervently believed in states’ rights and a strict construction of the Constitution.

In 1831, he retired to private life. He was not married or financially in need but he proposed to work for the Democrats on the sidelines and to resurrect his successful law practice. “Yet he remained politically ambitious and hoped to be on the rise again after his ten years in Congress” (p. 30). His retirement was not of long duration for in 1832, Jackson nominated him as Ambassador to Russia. After much hesitation, he accepted the position but was only in St. Petersburg for about a year and half.

Upon his return, he began another long stint, intermittently from 1834 to 1852, in Congress but this time in the upper house, the Senate. Slavery was slowly becoming a more pressing issue and James Buchanan had his own ideas on it. “Quietly opposed to the institution in theory for reasons he never explained, he believed it the nations’ weak link, not because it was inhumane, but rather for its potential to destroy the Union” (p. 33). In a rather brilliant political move, he turned down Martin Van Buren’s offer of the Attorney General position and remained in the Senate to propound his views. “Throughout his years in the Senate he held fast to two popular principles: manifest destiny and states’ rights” (p. 34).

“Through hard work, party loyalty, and residence in the second most populous state in the Union, Buchanan advanced in stature and position, moving up the committee ladder to ever more important positions and even more national notoriety. He was appointed to the Judicial Committee, the Committee on the District of Columbia, and eventually the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It was as a member of the latter that he became best known and made his most significant contributions to the future of the nation” (p. 34).


Under Polk’s administration, Buchanan was made Secretary of State. Although this is a very prestigious position, Buchanan, very clearly, played second fiddle to Polk on the foreign affairs front. Polk conducted the war and while he pulled Buchanan’s strings, the United States added more territory from Mexico, including Texas, California and pretty much all the areas in between.

Since Polk did not run for reelection, Buchanan was essentially out of a job in 1849 and he returned to his house, Wheatland, in Lancaster, PA. He was offered a Supreme Court position at one point and vacillated terribly until he finally came to the conclusion that it would damage his chances of being President of the US. No one had gone from the judicial to the executive branches in the history of the country before. He was getting older and so he became more open about his dreams of the presidency. “Fifty-eight years old in 1849, Buchanan had spent the best years of his life in public office. During that time he changed from energetic party enthusiast into an overweight, ambivalently ambitious politician…With his tilted head, protruding stomach, proportionally diminutive lower body, and heavily lidded eyes, one sometimes shut, he resembled an erect, two-footed tyrannosaur” (p. 46-7).

In 1852, his named was bandied about as president at the Democratic National Convention but he eventually lost to the dark horse candidate, Franklin Pierce. Pierce, as President, generously offered Buchanan the Ambassadorship to Great Britain. Another series of vacillations ensued but in the end, Buchanan decided in favor of this esteemed station and made his way to London during an extremely volatile period in US history.

Even though he was abroad, Buchanan did manage to stir up a little trouble there as well. Along with the US Ambassadors to Spain and France, Buchanan signed the Ostend Manifesto which stated that the US had the right to take Cuba, over every objection. It was so incendiary that Pierce quietly acted as if he never received it but it was unearthed by the media years later and people howled in protest.

Ok, we’ve made it to 1856. Buchanan won the Democratic nomination for president over Stephen Douglas, Senator of Illinois, mainly because he was abroad during Pierce’s presidential debacles. On the flip side, the Whigs had slowly winked out of existence since Fillmore’s presidency and in 1856, they were split into several different factions, including the Know-Nothing (American) Party, the Republicans, and a very, watered-down version of the Whigs. The Know-Nothings nominated former President Millard Fillmore while the newly-organized Republican Party nominated John C. Fremont, governor of California and adventurer. Buchanan won but not in a landslide. The American people should have taken notice of all the votes that Fremont and the Republicans received.

How do I begin to tell of the problems with the Buchanan presidency? Since there are so many I’ve decided just to list them out.
1. Dred Scott vs Sandford: After his election but before his inauguration, Buchanan used his influence to shape the outcome of the Dred Scott case by pressuring a Pennsylvania justice to change his vote. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that Dred Scott, a free black man, could be sold into slavery were he to venture into the South. In fact, they stated that blacks had no rights whatsoever, thereby sounding the death knell of the Missouri Compromise. “Without Buchanan’s encouragement, Grier, the only northerner to join in Taney’s [the Chief Justice] decision, might not have joined the others” (p. 86).
2. Patronage: As stated in other blogs, patronage was a Big Deal for any president. If used properly, it was a great way to reward loyalty and gain votes and successful patronage appointments would almost guarantee an easy time for any president. However (and you knew there would be an ‘however’), Buchanan did not successfully use his patronage to endear himself to his followers. Not only did a disproportionately-large number of northern Democrats find themselves out of a job and other southern Democrats stepping into them, but Buchanan fired any Democrat that had ties to Pierce or to Stephen Douglas. Buchanan’s heavy-handed handling of his patronage opportunities would deal a severe blow to the Democratic Party.
3. The Cabinet: Sigh. Buchanan’s sheer inability to find a workable cabinet is startling, even after he had spent decades of his life in political circles. “In the end Buchanan’s cabinet selections proved a disaster. To choose, as he did, four members from the future Confederacy and three northern Democrats who, like Buchanan, were doughfaces was an insult to the North” (p. 79). It didn’t help that his vice president, Lewis Cass, was practically too old to function and the others all shared the same southern ideas and values. It wouldn’t help either that most of his cabinet would be involved in major governmental corruption scandals on a huge scale. “Certainly his cabinet officers were among the most corrupt in American history” (p. 114).
4. The Panic of 1857: After Buchanan’s inauguration, banks began to fold in an effort to call in unrecoverable loans, while land values and jobs disappeared. This Panic would hit the North hardest of all since the South, at that time, was agriculturally self-sufficient.
5. The Deficit: “Despite his plans for a balanced budge, Buchanan left Lincoln a deficit of over $17 million” (p. 90).
6. Kansas: Ooohhh, this political issue was a whopper. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, during Pierce’s presidency, gave Kansas and Nebraska the option, as new states, to choose whether they wanted to have slavery or not (even though both were above the Missouri Compromise line.) Nebraska was immediately seen as a free state but Kansas was desired by the South even though Kansans themselves wished to be free. Bloody chaos ensued along with rigged elections, phony government, and an unfair constitution touting pro-slavery restrictions over the popular majority. Buchanan did help matters when he stubbornly refused to throw out the Lecompton (proslavery) government and he feverishly worked to have Kansas’s “constitution” slammed through Congress. Even though Buchanan and his sketchy cabinet used immense amounts of lobbying and even bribery to secure the vote, it was dismissed in the House of Representatives. Another vote was held in Kansas, a fair vote this time, and the overwhelming majority of Kansans stated that they wished to be free state. In an effort to look on the bright side, Buchanan merely claimed that the violence in Kansas was now over, thanks to him. “With the insouciance that often marked his failures, he noted his pleasure that the excitement over slavery in Kansas had been resolved” (p. 105).
7. The Democratic Party Split: The split in the Democratic Party would not be noticeable until the presidential convention in 1860 but already Buchanan was sowing the seeds of discord within his own party. With his obvious reliance on southern Democrats, his contempt of northern Democrats became every day more apparent. Not only did he find most Northerners too radical but he did not like to reward loyal Democrats because they were followers of Douglas and Pierce. Pierce was a political has-been at this juncture but Stephen Douglas was at the top of his game and the treatment that he would receive from Buchanan, a fellow Democrat, aided the final split.
8. Use of Imperial Powers: Buchanan, during his presidency, used his presidential powers almost indiscriminately. At one point, he wanted Cuba so much (as another slave state) that he nearly forced Congress to vote him the funds to buy it. He also wanted more of Mexico and even sent a squadron of the US Navy down to Paraguay on a supposed insult.
9. Ignorance of Secession: Throughout his presidency, Buchanan simply ignored the idea that the South, his friends, might actually stick to their word and secede from the Union. When secession became a very real issue in 1860, Buchanan famously vacillated some more and finally issued a statement saying that he could not force anyone to stay in the Union. “While northern Republican newspapers complained that he brought dishonor to the nation and should be impeached, the New York Senator William Seward, soon to be Lincoln’s secretary of state, observed that what Buchanan espoused was that no state had a right to secede unless it wanted to and that the government must save the Union unless someone opposed it” (p. 128). In the months before Lincoln was inaugurated, Buchanan did absolutely nothing to halt the flow of various states that seceding right before his eyes. “In fact Buchanan’s failing during the crisis over the Union was not inactivity but rather his partiality for the South, a favoritism that bordered on disloyalty in a officer pledged to defend all the United States…In his betrayal of the national trust, Buchanan came closer to committing treason than any other president in American history” (p. 142).

The Democratic National Convention of 1860 split into three separate groups, none of them nominating Buchanan. After Lincoln’s inauguration and the dissolution of the Union, he retired to his home at Wheatlands but maintained a strictly pro-Union stance. Buchanan spent his last days trying to vindicate his presidency with an interesting and biased, yet unfinished autobiography. He died of pneumonia at the age of 77.

#14 Franklin Pierce Part 2

Really Cool Stuff about Franklin Pierce
1. Franklin Pierce went to Bowdoin College in Maine where he would become life-long friends of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Nathaniel wrote Pierce’s campaign biography in 1852 and then dedicated his last book Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches to Franklin Pierce. In fact, Hawhorne died while vacationing with Pierce in New Hampshire.
2. Franklin Pierce was considered a heavy drinker pretty much his entire life. “Heavy drinking and Pierce’s name go together like a horse and carriage, and years later his political opponents would label him a drunkard” (p. 7). Pierce would eventually die of liver damage.
3. Pierce was exceedingly prosouthern in his political viewpoint, causing him to espouse southern causes even over the voices of his own northern constituency. In fact, Pierce was the author of the infamous Gag Rule that kept all talk of slavery out of Congress during the 1830s and 1840s. “The proper course, Pierce told the House in a speech on December 18, was to receive but then automatically table such [abolitionist] petitions without any further consideration, the solution that the House would ultimately adopt in May 1836 in what became known as the Gag Rule” (p. 18).
4. Accusations of cowardice would follow him his entire life. In the North he was known as a “doughface.” “Significantly this article also labeled Pierce a doughface, a term that subsequently connoted a northern with southern sympathies, but in the North at the time it was an allegation of personal cowardice” (p. 19). And of course, there was his Mexican War record. “That Pierce had seemingly fainted in response to enemy fire inspired someone to shout, ‘Take command of the brigade. General Pierce is a damned coward’” (p. 29).
5. Pierce really did have a remarkable memory. Not only did he remember just about every name and face he met, but he would use them in his legal and political career. When he was arguing a case, he would call the jurors by name. Even as president, he stunned people with his method of recall. “At his inauguration on March 4, 1853, he astonished the crowd by delivering his carefully prepared address without once glancing at the notes that he held next to his thigh” (p. 52).
6. It was during Pierce’s administration that the continental United States filled out its present day size through the Gadsden Purchase. “When Pierce announced that he had no fear of territorial acquisition, one of the targets he had in mind was the area of northern Mexico south of New Mexico Territory, an area that seemed necessary for the completion of any transcontinental railroad to the Pacific coast along a southern route” (p.55).
7. It is a dubious distinction for Pierce that his presidential policies were credited for the rise of the nascent Republican Party. “One of the new parties that emerged in reaction to the organization of Nebraska, which Pierce endorsed, was the Republican Party, and it was the victory of that party in the presidential election of 1860 that provoked secession and the Civil War” (p. 73).
8. Franklin Pierce was good friends with Jefferson Davis and even tried to become his lawyer in 1867 when his trial for treason was scheduled. “In a long conversation that lasted well into the evening, Davis made it clear that he did not need Pierce’s legal help at the trial...Still Davis was deeply touched by Pierce’s effort. Before Pierce left, Davis jotted a brief note of thanks: ‘Given this day made bright by a visit of my beloved friend and ever honored chief’” (p. 130).

I felt that Michael Holt did a good job of bringing Franklin Pierce to life and to bring us newbies into the heated, suffocatingly-sectional world of mid-nineteenth century America. Just reading about this time period has me on the edge of my seat with all the anticipation and foreshadowing of the Civil War. Holt also gives us some good information about balloting and elections at this time and reasons why political parties came and went like water. “In the nineteenth century, however, governments did not print and distribute ballots. That was the job of the political parties themselves. In effect, this system meant that all that was needed to launch a new party was access to printing presses and enough volunteer manpower to distribute the ballot at the polls” (p. 84).

I was not a fan of the author’s redundant use of the word “precocious.” To Holt, it appeared that everything Frank did was precocious. It just got on my nerves. A fully grown man can no longer be labeled precocious, Mr. Holt.

With all the deliciously bad things I had heard about Franklin Pierce, I have to admit that I’m a little disappointed. Now he wasn’t a great president, mind you, but he wasn’t the evil, Union-destroying sadist that I was led to expect. In fact, I believe that he is more of a lovable doofus rather than an outright evil mastermind. Let’s put it this way, Franklin Pierce made some Very Bad Decisions, probably without knowing the full ramifications, and history has judged him very harshly thereby. “Historians almost uniformly rank Pierce among the nation’s worst presidents, indeed, because of his role in securing organization of Nebraska and thus bringing on the Civil War” (p. 73). But, goodness, how was he to know?

Holt gives us his reasons for Pierce’s continuously low rating as president. “Historians, indeed, usually rank Pierce among the six or eight worst presidents the country has ever had. Two things primarily account for that negative judgment. A passionately committed Democratic Party loyalist, Pierce during his presidency managed to divide his party into fiercely warring factional camps. More important, he helped propel the nation down the road to the Civil War…Also as a result, Pierce was the only president in the nineteenth century who sought, but was denied, renomination by his beloved party” (p. 2).

Yes, Franklin Pierce could have used sounder judgment and a more farsighted approach to his political decisions. Also he allowed the love of party and a general insecurity to overwhelm his political wisdom in certain vital matters. But I still maintain that he is painted blacker than he should be. After all, weren’t the sectional issues already very pronounced by Pierce’s presidency? And couldn’t we indict many people, presidents and otherwise, who helped propel the country toward war, possibly including Lincoln himself? Franklin Pierce probably would have been a decent president if nothing untoward had gone down during his administration. He was a perfect peacetime candidate. Unfortunately, this looks like a scenario of “wrong place, wrong time” and I heartily feel sorry for him.