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Born in 1791, James Buchanan grew up in rural Pennsylvania. He graduated from Dickinson College in 1809. After moving to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he studied law and gained admission to the bar in 1812. Two years later he was elected to the state assembly as a Federalist and then won election to the House of Representatives in 1820. During the 1820s he shifted from Federalist to Democratic ranks as an early supporter of Andrew Jackson. After declining to stand for reelection to Congress in 1830, he spent two years as minister to Russia (1832-1834) before returning to the United States to serve in the U.S. Senate for the next eleven years. He soon showed himself a staunch supporter of the South when it came to the defense of slavery's constitutionality, as his January 1836 remarks to Congress suggest. As secretary of state during the administration of James Polk (1845-1849) he oversaw negotiations leading to the settlement of the Oregon question (an agreement over the boundary between the western United States and Canada) and advised the president during the Mexican-American War. He retired to private life in 1849, but he accepted an appointment as minister to England in 1853 during the Franklin Pierce administration. In June 1856 he beat out Pierce and Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas for the Democratic presidential nomination and defeated Republican John C. Fremont and Know Nothing Millard Fillmore in the fall contest.

In his inaugural address, Buchanan once more urged the nation to accept slavery's constitutionality as the first step to quell agitation of the issue. Two days after he took office, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, complete with Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's finding that neither Congress nor territorial governments could bar the expansion of slavery into the territories. Far from settling the issue of slavery in the territories, the Court's decision added more kindling to a fire that had been raging since 1854.

When Buchanan backed a proposed constitution for the Kansas Territory framed by pro-slavery forces meeting at Lecompton, Douglas broke with the administration, claiming that the constitution was the result of fraud. The president went so far as to try to disrupt Douglas's bid for reelection to the Senate in 1858: in turn Douglas blocked Senate passage of the Lecompton proposal, ending slaveholders' bid to have Kansas enter the Union as a slave state.

Republicans achieved significant gains in the congressional elections of 1858, owing in part to Buchanan's efforts to lower the protective tariff and his failure to respond to an economic crisis, the burden of which was especially felt in the North, including Buchanan's own Pennsylvania. In 1859 the sectional crisis escalated anew, most notably when John Brown seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, as the first step in his attempt to ignite a slave insurrection. Many Deep South Democrats joined advocates of secession in splitting the Democratic Party in 1860, ensuring that Republicans would elect Abraham Lincoln president.

Buchanan opposed secession but doubted that he could do much to prevent it. His last annual message pleaded with both sides to step back from the abyss of disunion and possible war, calling on northerners to cease agitating on the issue of slavery and southerners to abandon secession. Neither side heeded his words. By the time he left office, seven southern states had formed a new Confederate States of America, with several other slaveholding states still deliberating whether they would remain in the Union, join the new republic, or chart some middle course. Retiring to his beloved Wheatland, just outside Lancaster, Buchanan spent the remainder of his life defending his administration.

References:

1. Baker, Jean H. James Buchanan. New York: Times Books, 2004.

2. Binder, Frederick M. James Buchanan and the American Empire. Selinsgrove, Penn.: Susquehanna University Press, 1994.

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