President James Buchanan

President James Buchanan: A Biography, is historian Philip S. Klein’s attempt to provide a balanced appraisal of the life and work of our much maligned fifteenth United States president. In one of several laudatory reviews of the book when it was published in 1962, Leonard P. Curry wrote in the Indiana Magazine of History, “Here, at long last is a highly reliable biography of James Buchanan by a scholar who thoroughly understands both the man and the nineteenth-century environment in which he operated.” Klein takes us chronologically through Buchanan’s life from his childhood, to his first political position as a Pennsylvania state legislator, through to his presidency and his final years. When he ascended to the presidency, Buchanan was the most experienced man to enter the Whitehouse and that held true through most of the twentieth-century. He had been a congressman, a senator, a diplomat, and secretary of state. Klein goes into great detail about each of these periods in Buchanan’s life, about the political machinations that opened each opportunity and which kept Buchanan one of the most powerful men in Pennsylvania politics through much of his adult life.

All of this experience notwithstanding, Buchanan’s March 1857 to March 1861 presidential term is considered by many historians, and by the much of the public during his lifetime, to have been a monumental failure. In a recent book, historian Jean H. Baker says of Buchanan, “This book [her 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.” With regard to the public, Buchanan was thought by many in the north to be a southern sympathizer and to have failed to stop the Civil War, if not actively to have sought it (410). Because he was a staunch believer in the preservation of the Union, southern secessionists viewed him with equal antipathy when he made clear his belief that they did not have a right to secession (361). He was vilified in the press, harassed by his Pennsylvania neighbors, had condemnation resolutions laid down before the US Senate, and was subjected to a deluge of negative reaction any time he tried to defend himself (408-415).

Conversely, Klein highlights many of Buchanan’s accomplishments throughout his career, including the international successes during his presidency. However, most of Klein’s 506-page tome on Buchanan’s life depicts the period prior to his presidency. It is an in-depth study that gives his readers the background necessary to better understand what shaped the man, his political and governing philosophies, and his public and private relationships. The book is impressively well sourced, including a 41-page section of endnotes and a 20-page bibliography with an imposing number of primary sources.

To help make his point about the blame laid at Buchanan for the war, Klein opens his prologue with a vivid picture of Sunday night, June 28, 1863. He describes the frantic movements of the people as they rush along the Marietta Pike toward Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They are fleeing the oncoming Confederate soldiers rumored to be on the way to Harrisburg. “Most of the riders seemed intent on their own business; but where the pike ran past the spacious grounds of Wheatland, home of former President Buchanan, some would shout, ‘You damned rebel!’ or ‘I hope they burn you out like they did Thad Stevens (xvii).”

While the sections outlining in minute detail the events leading up to and after the secession of the southern states are deeply engrossing, they are not the focus nor the guts of Klein’s work. Instead, Klein provides copious material about the actions Buchanan takes starting early in the nineteenth century to give us insight into how the man thought about the issues, how he made decisions and how he engaged with people in both professional and personal relationships. Klein reveals Buchanan as a man of painstaking, cautious thinking, a man engrossed in the details of political machinations, who calculated with great purpose the potential costs of every professional and personal move he made.

Klein gives us many instances of Buchanan the political manipulator. One of the most striking occurred as he was getting ready to accept his election to the US Senate by the Pennsylvania State Legislature. Thinking through how he would handle the most difficult issues facing the nation and the Senate, “There was one problem of the senatorship about which Buchanan worried a great deal… discussion in Washington of the tariff, the Bank, and the slavery issues. How could a senator work with the national Administration and with his own State Legislature when these two took opposite views on a particular bill?” Buchanan had a solution. “Buchanan told the committee of the Legislature…that he held the right of instruction to be sacred. ‘If it did not exist the servant would be superior to his master.’ He would either obey instructions…or resign, but in giving a vote against his own judgment, ‘I act merely as their agent. The responsibility is theirs, not mine (102).”

Klein portrays Buchanan as a man of ambition and pride. Discussing Buchanan’s reaction to the implosion of the Federalist Party, and his view that he must resurrect a party structure in Pennsylvania while supporting Jackson, whom he did not greatly admire, Klein says: "During those years [1820s], he tried to weld into a single political organization as motley a political assortment as anyone ever attempted to control. It would be a personal party, a Buchanan party; one based on his reputation for personal integrity, his concrete achievements for his constituents, and his promise for the future. Jackson would be the cement of this miscellany, but when it took form it would stand solidly as a monument to Buchanan (53)."

Fundamentally, the one ruling ideology that is consistent throughout his career is his belief in what he understood to be a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Since the Constitution contained the three fifths compromise, Buchanan could legitimately lean on the Constitution to condone the political expediency of slavery in the south. And, since slavery was constitutional and because he saw westward expansion as vital to America’s future, he could consider extending the Missouri Compromise to the west, expanding the reach of slavery, if it would facilitate that expansion, “Buchanan thought Congress should act by extending the Missouri Compromise line to California, thus prohibiting slavery north of 36o 30’ and leaving the problem south of that line ‘to be decided by the people (211).”

However, the Buchanan Klein wants to bring us in this book is also fundamentally a very smart man. He is one who sought to do his duty as he saw it; a lawyer who wanted to remain faithful to the promise he felt was manifest in the legal document that underpinned a great political, governmental experiment. In the end, when Lincoln was elected and secession seemed inevitable, Buchanan the lawyer emerges. The Constitution did not give the states the right to secede from the Union. He may have tried once again to hedge his bets as he had throughout his life, “But Buchanan did tell a group of secessionists exactly where he stood. In a long conference at the White House during the third week of November, he said that he would deny any ‘right’ of secession and oppose it strongly (361).” Without tossing away his historian’s objectivity, his ability to view Buchanan through a relatively clear lens, it is still apparent that Klein had great admiration for the man. He closes this study lauding Buchanan’s talents, while lamenting the restrictions placed on him by the context of his times. “His many talents, which in a quieter era might have gained for him a place among the great presidents of his country, were quickly overshadowed by the cataclysmic events of civil war and by the towering personality of Abraham Lincoln. Of Buchanan it might be said, as it was later of another, “He staked his reputation on the supremacy of reason, and lost (429).”

Unfortunately, for this reader, Prof. Klein may also have lost in his bid to rehabilitate this president’s image. It is true that the facts about Buchanan show the falsity of many of the uglier accusations hurled at him through the decades. Still, the facts also take us to the portrait that Klein must then paint of the man – a political operative who views the offices he holds as stepping stones to the next rung up, culminating in the presidency, which he sees as simply the highest administrative position. His beliefs about the monumental issues that roiled and almost imploded a nation can at best be characterized as flexible and his lack of vision and ideals eventually proves his undoing. When he had to be a leader, a persuader, he failed. He simply did not have the strength of purpose to carry it off.