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United States Presidents
Early Years: Buchanan loved to learn and worked hard in his father's store. He went to Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and eventually graduated with honors. He studied law and had a very successful practice in Lancaster. His Presidency: When South Carolina seceded from the Union and six more states followed, Buchanan wanted to keep the rest of the slave states loyal to the Union. He also wanted to protect federal property and enforce the laws in the South, but he was unable to solve the problems and was happy to leave the presidency. His Life: Tall, stately, stiffly formal in the high stock he wore around his jowls, James Buchanan was the only President who never married. Presiding over a rapidly dividing Nation, Buchanan grasped inadequately the political realities of the time. Relying on constitutional doctrines to close the widening rift over slavery, he failed to understand that the North would not accept constitutional arguments which favored the South. Nor could he realize how sectionalism had realigned political parties: the Democrats split; the Whigs were destroyed, giving rise to the Republicans. Born into a well-to-do Pennsylvania family in 1791, Buchanan, a graduate of Dickinson College, was gifted as a debater and learned in the law. He was elected five times to the House of Representatives; then, after an interlude as Minister to Russia, served for a decade in the Senate. He became Polk's Secretary of State and Pierce's Minister to Great Britain. Service abroad helped to bring him the Democratic nomination in 1856 because it had exempted him from involvement in bitter domestic controversies. As President-elect, Buchanan thought the crisis would disappear if he maintained a sectional balance in his appointments and could persuade the people to accept constitutional law as the Supreme Court interpreted it. The Court was considering the legality of restricting slavery in the territories, and two justices hinted to Buchanan what the decision would be. Thus, in his Inaugural the President referred to the territorial question as "happily, a matter of but little practical importance" since the Supreme Court was about to settle it "speedily and finally." Two days later Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the Dred Scott decision, asserting that Congress had no constitutional power to deprive persons of their property rights in slaves in the territories. Southerners were delighted, but the decision created a furor in the North. Buchanan decided to end the troubles in Kansas by urging the admission of the territory as a slave state. Although he directed his Presidential authority to this goal, he further angered the Republicans and alienated members of his own party. Kansas remained a territory. When Republicans won a plurality in the House in 1858, every significant bill they passed fell before southern votes in the Senate or a Presidential veto. The Federal Government reached a stalemate. Sectional strife rose to such a pitch in 1860 that the Democratic Party split into northern and southern wings, each nominating its own candidate for the Presidency. Consequently, when the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln, it was a foregone conclusion that he would be elected even though his name appeared on no southern ballot. Rather than accept a Republican administration, the southern "fire-eaters" advocated secession. President Buchanan, dismayed and hesitant, denied the legal right of states to secede but held that the Federal Government legally could not prevent them. He hoped for compromise, but secessionist leaders did not want compromise. Then Buchanan took a more militant tack. As several Cabinet members resigned, he appointed northerners, and sent the Star of the West to carry reinforcements to Fort Sumter. On January 9, 1861, the vessel was far away. Buchanan reverted to a policy of inactivity that continued until he left office. In March 1861 he retired to his Pennsylvania home Wheatland--where he died seven years later--leaving his successor to resolve the frightful issue facing the Nation. Buchanan died in Wheatland 1868. Quotations "The distribution of patronage of the Government is by far the most disagreeable duty of the President. Applicants are so numerous, and their applications are pressed with such eagerness by their friends both in and out of Congress, that the selection of one for any desirable office gives offense to many." -James Buchanan "[Constitutions are] restraints imposed, not by arbitrary authority, but by people upon themselves and their own representatives." -James Buchanan "From Caesar to Cromwell, and from Cromwell to Napoleon . . . history presents the same solemn warning—beware of elevating to the highest civil trust the commander of our victorious armies." -James Buchanan "I believe [slavery] to be a great political and great moral evil. I thank God, my lot has been cast in a State Where it does not exist. But, while I entertain these opinions, I know it is an evil at present without a remedy . . . one of those moral evils, from which it is impossible for us to escape, without the introduction of evils infinitely greater. There are portions of this Union, in which, if you emancipate our slaves, the will become masters. There can be no middle course." -James Buchanan (1826) "It is better to bear the ills we have than to fly to others we know not of." -James Buchanan "Whatever the result may be, I shall carry to my grave the consciousness that I at least meant well for my country." -James Buchanan "There is nothing stable but Heaven and the Constitution." -James Buchanan "Capital and capitalists . . .Are proverbially timid." -James Buchanan "It is beyond question the destiny of our race to spread themselves over the continent of North America . . . The tide of emigrants will flow to the South." -James Buchanan "All agree that under the Constitution slavery in the States is beyond the reach of any human power except that of the respective States themselves wherein it exists. May we not, then, hope that the long agitation on this subject is approaching its end, and that the geographical parties to which it has given birth, so much dreaded by the Father of his Country, will speedily become extinct? . . . Throughout the whole progress of this agitation, which has scarcely known any intermission for more than twenty years, whilst it has been productive of no positive good to any human being, it has been the prolific source of great evils to the master, to the slave, and to the whole country. It has alienated and estranged the people of the sister states from each other, and has even seriously endangered the very existence of the Union. . . . should the agitation continue it may eventually endanger the personal safety of a large portion of our countrymen where the institution exists. In that event no form of government, however admirable in itself and however productive of material benefits, can compensate for the loss of peace and domestic security around the family altar. Let every Union-loving man, therefore, exert his best influence to suppress this agitation." -James
Buchanan Speeches Inaugural address, March 4, 1857
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