“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.
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