World Famous Comics: James Buchanan (The American Presidents)
James Buchanan (The American Presidents)
By: Jean H. Baker Publisher: Times Books Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Times Books Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 192 Publication Date: June 07, 2004
A provocative reconsideration of a presidency on the brink of Civil War
Almost no president was as well trained and well prepared for the office as James Buchanan. He had served in the Pennsylvania state legislature, the U.S. House, and the U.S. Senate; he was Secretary of State and was even offered a seat on the Supreme Court. And yet, by every measure except his own, James Buchanan was a miserable failure as president, leaving office in disgrace. Virtually all of his intentions were thwarted by his own inability to compromise: he had been unable to resolve issues of slavery, caused his party to split-thereby ensuring the election of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln-and made the Civil War all but inevitable.
Historian Jean H. Baker explains that we have rightly placed Buchanan at the end of the presidential rankings, but his poor presidency should not be an excuse to forget him. To study Buchanan is to consider the implications of weak leadership in a time of national crisis. Elegantly written, Baker's volume offers a balanced look at a crucial moment in our nation's history and explores a man who, when given the opportunity, failed to rise to the challenge.
A fair assessment of a bad President. James Buchanan possibly was one of the best qualified men to assume the office of President. Qualifications don't mean anything if you don't have backbone and belief in principles. Buchanan bent over backward to try to please his Southern friends and it didn't get him anywhere. He tried to be rigid on forcing the North to bend to the South's ways. This didn't help him in the North. He defied the will of the people of Kansas and made more enemies. Finally everybody was fed up with this man. The South suceeded and the North elected the Republicans. The Democrats became a wilderness party for the next twenty eight odd years. James Buchanan played an instrumental role in the downfall of the Democratic Party and the United States.
This is a short quick read. However Baker makes it plain that leadership does not develop from experience. A better leader may have found a way to change and compromise so that the United States didn't not go through a horrible war. Poor leadership by James Buchanan.
Accessible biography of a failed presidency James Buchanan came to the presidency with a wonderful resume. And he failed dismally. This brief biography, part of the well done "The American Presidents" series, tries to explain that disconnect. In the recurring introduction to each volume in the series that he edited, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. remarked that (Page xvii) "To succeed, presidents must not only have a port to seek but they must convince Congress and the electorate that it is a port worth seeking." And "there's the rub" for Buchanan.
His background was impeccable: Pennsylvania state legislature, U. S. House of Representatives and Senate, Secretary of State, Ambassador to Russia and England. As Jean Baker, the author of this slim volume says (Page 7): "Critical times often summon forth our best presidents, and it is worth taking the measure of those presidents who, given the opportunity, failed to rise to greatness. James Buchanan was one of those."
The Democratic nomination for president culminated at the Convention. Franklin Pierce (incumbent president), Stephen Douglas, Lewis Cass, and Buchanan. After some maneuvering, Buchanan's supporters helped get him the nomination.
After his election, though, he ran into a buzz saw: a panic (depression), violence in Kansas, and the horrific "Dred Scott" Supreme Court decision. Buchanan selected a Cabinet that was very much pro-Southern, some of his closest allies were from the South, and he alienated Democrats such as Stephen Douglas. He did not recognize the danger of the slavery issue and watched as his pro-Southern stance split the Democratic Party, enabling the one thing anathema to him to occur--the election of a Republican in 1860, Abraham Lincoln.
Why did he fail so miserably? Unreflective prosouthernism is one part of the explanation, according to Baker. Other factors--his arrogant and uncompromising use of power.
So, an interesting essay on a failed president. I think that personality quirks might be overemphasized in this book. Overall, though, a useful volume for those who want a quick introduction to the presidents.
And nooww... James! Buchanan!!! There are 72 reviews of this brief and simply-written biography of a President who came to office with superb qualifications and who bungled the job that perhaps no one could have done. I found the book quite adequate as an introduction to the decade of the 1850s. Causes have to precede effects; anyone interested in the causes of the Civil War ought to have a good look at the events that led to Buchanan's election, and the dismal decision Buchanan made in reaction to those events. Honestly, however, you needn't buy the book. Just read the 72 reviews herewith. It will take some patience, and some tolerance for bad syntax, but it will reveal just exactly how polarizing the Civil War was, and still is.
This "American Presidents" series is surprisingly top notch. I also recommend the biography of US Grant, the most underrated and slandered chief exec of American history.
One of the "feckless triumvirate of antebellum presidential losers" So Jean Baker judges James Buchanan. (5 points if you can name the other two members of the triumvirate.) For her, his presidency was a miserable failure. This was surprising because, at least on paper, no man was more qualified to be chief executive. Buchanan had personal contact with every president since James Madison. He'd served as a congressman, senator, cabinet officer, leader of his party (Democrats), and minister to England. Moreover, in a post-Jacksoninan period when the presidency was viewed as a primarily administrative (rather than executive) office (perhaps this goes some way toward accounting for the "feckless triumvirate"), Buchanan saw himself as a wielder of power and an initiator of policy.
But Baker argues that Buchanan, for all his apparent qualifications, was too dogmatically pro-Southern in his views, and too unpragmatic in dealing with sectional crises, to be an effective president. He stacked his cabinet with pro-slavery yes men (a cabinet, by the way, which was notoriously corrupt). He pulled strings behind the scenes to persuade a fellow-Pennsylvanian on the Supreme Court to vote with Taney on Dred Scott. He totally fumbled the Kansas crisis, doggedly defending the Lecomptian slave constitution even when it became clear that the vast majority in Kansas were free-staters. And in the long lame duck period before Lincoln took office, when the states in the lower South pulled out of the Union, Buchanan completely lost his head and became paralyzed with indecision and panic, sometimes unable to get out of bed.
Baker, unlike other more sympathetic biographers, doesn't see Buchanan as a peacemaker caught in a tide of unstoppable sectional conflict so much as a man largely unqualified by temperament (gloomy, pessimistic, fatalistic) and dogmatic partisanship to handle the crisis. Perhaps. I don't claim to know enough about Buchanan to evaluate her conclusion. But I do know two things. First, she's presented a convincing case for Buchanan's incompetence and downright shadiness when it comes to the Kansas crisis, and there's good reason to think that this example is representative of his entire presidency. Second, I'd have liked to have learned more about Buchanan the man in order to be satisfied that Baker's characterization of his temperament was accurate. I know that her volume is in a series that focuses on presidential administrations, and so a full-fledged biography would've been inappropriate. But nonetheless, I didn't actually get a feel for Buchanan the person in reading her book.
Buchanan in the presidential basement Over the years the occupier of the cellar of American presidents has changed. When I was growing up, Warren G. Harding held the title as "Worst President Ever", then Ulysses S. Grant seemed to vie for a tie. In more recent years and given a more thorough look, James Buchanan now resides there and Jean H. Baker's excellent short biography of President Buchanan goes into some reasons why that has happened.
Far from being the domestic American Neville Chamberlain of his day, Baker argues that vacillation wasn't Buchanan's worst trait (although it was a pretty bad one) but his pro-Southern views were. As a seasoned politician and diplomat, our fifteenth president was arguably one of the best prepared to take over the presidency in 1857. But, as suggested, things began to heat up fast and Buchanan's support of the Dred Scott Decision, perhaps the worst Supreme Court decision in U.S. history, got the ball rolling. Buchanan seemed to be feckless at every turn, managing to alienate his own party politicians with decisions that pleased no one in the end. But her chapter on the lame-duck months of Buchanan's presidency is the best of the book, as it should be. This four-month transition is one of the most important in presidential turnovers and has been heavily scrutinized for decades with the author coming down hard on Buchanan. What might have been done to save the country had Buchanan actually moved swiftly and successfully to reinforce Fort Sumter, for instance? We'll never know, but Baker gives the reader some things about which to think.
On the personal side, the author delves lightly into Buchanan's possible homosexuality and concludes, like everyone else, we'll never know. But she does make an interesting point toward the end of the book when she contemplates the reasons for Buchanan's pro-Southern tilt by suggesting that the president preferred the more genteel southern ways to the edginess of his northern counterparts.
The American Presidents series is terrific and I've read several of the presidential mini-biographies. This is one of the best and I highly recommend it.
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