The Bystander Who Wasn't

When a country tears itself apart, how much of it belongs to the person in charge? The forces are usually older and larger than any one official. Economies, migrations, and moral arguments build for decades, and by the time they break, the person holding office can look less like an author than a bystander standing where the wall happened to fall. But officials make decisions, decisions have effects, and "it was coming anyway" is the most comfortable sentence in politics for anyone who would rather not defend what they actually did.

That is the question this report is about, and one presidency is an unusually clean test of it. The man in question spent four years insisting he had no choices. His own letters show him making them.

On 4 March 1857, James Buchanan stood on the east portico of the Capitol and told the country that the question tearing it apart would be answered by someone else. The status of slavery in the western territories, he said, was a judicial question, pending before the Supreme Court, and it would be "speedily and finally settled." To whatever the Court decided, he would "cheerfully submit."

Two days later the Court ruled. Buchanan had known the shape of that ruling for nearly two weeks. He had written to two of the justices to help arrange it.

That gap, between a public posture of helplessness and a private record of choosing, is the whole argument. Getting to it requires knowing what the fight was actually about, because the machinery of it is unfamiliar now. That comes first.

Why every new state was a knife fight

The United States in 1857 was a federation of 31 states, sixteen where slavery was illegal and fifteen where it was legal. The vocabulary is worth fixing in place, because everything else runs on it. A free state was one whose own laws prohibited slavery. A slave state was one whose laws permitted it. Nobody in mainstream politics then expected the national government to abolish slavery inside a slave state, and the president, his eventual successor and the Supreme Court all agreed it had no power to.

The fight was over new land, and it was a fight about arithmetic. Every state admitted to the union received two seats in the Senate, the upper chamber of the national legislature, regardless of how few people lived there. Admitting a state as free or slave therefore shifted the balance of national power permanently. With the Senate split 32 to 30, a single new state was worth more than a decade of argument.

Where the new land came from

In 1803 the United States bought roughly 828,000 square miles from France, stretching from the Mississippi River west to the Rocky Mountains. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the country overnight and created the problem that eventually broke it: an enormous territory with no settled answer on slavery.

The first answer was the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Congress admitted Missouri as a slave state, admitted Maine as a free state to keep the Senate even, and drew a line across the rest of the Purchase at latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes. North of the line slavery was prohibited, south of it permitted. The arrangement held for thirty-four years and was treated as close to sacred. Kansas lay north of the line, so slavery was illegal there from 1820 onward.

How the line was destroyed

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed it. The act carved two new territories out of that northern land, Kansas and the larger Nebraska above it, and replaced the geographic rule with a procedural one: popular sovereignty, meaning the settlers themselves would vote on whether to permit slavery. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois wrote the act and President Franklin Pierce signed it. Buchanan was serving as the American minister to Britain at the time and endorsed it from a distance as party policy. His own earlier preference had been to extend the 36 degrees 30 minutes line all the way to the Pacific, keeping a geographic rule rather than putting the question to a vote. Some historians treat his abandonment of that position as his first consequential mistake.

Nebraska stayed quiet. It was too far north for plantation agriculture and bordered no slave state. Kansas bordered Missouri, which was a slave state, so proslavery Missourians could cross the line to settle, vote and fight. Armed partisans arrived from both sections, elections were stolen outright, and the resulting low-grade civil war of 1855 to 1859 became known as Bleeding Kansas. Popular sovereignty turned a question of law into a contest of force. That was not an unforeseeable side effect; it was the predictable result of making a violent question depend on who showed up.

How it looked to voters at the time, 1856Reynolds's Political Map, printed for the first Republican presidential campaign. Free states, slave states and the territory thrown open by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise are coloured separately, with statistical tables headed "Freedom vs. Slavery" comparing railroads, newspapers and schools North and South. It is campaign material rather than neutral cartography, which is what makes it useful: this is the argument as northern voters were being shown it eight months before Buchanan took office. Source: Wikimedia Commons, from the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, public domain.

What is not in dispute, and what is

Almost none of the underlying facts of this presidency are contested by historians. The disagreement is about weighting.

Not in dispute. Buchanan corresponded with two sitting Supreme Court justices about a case then before them and urged a broad ruling, then endorsed that ruling before it was public. He supported admitting Kansas as a slave state under a constitution its own voters had rejected by roughly 74 to 1. That fight split his party in half and cost him the most powerful senator in it. In his final annual message, the written report each president then sent to Congress once a year, he declared secession unconstitutional and simultaneously declared that the national government had no constitutional power to stop it. He left office with almost every federal installation in the Deep South in secessionist hands and seven states gone.

In dispute. Whether any of it changed the outcome. Whether a different president in 1857 could have delayed or prevented war. Whether his inaction in the winter of 1860 to 1861 was cowardice, legal scruple, or the only realistic option for a man commanding an army of sixteen thousand scattered across the western frontier. And, hardest of all, what he believed he was doing.

A president who wrote to the justices

The case was Dred Scott v. Sandford. Dred Scott was an enslaved man in Missouri who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his owner had taken him to live for years in Illinois and in Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was illegal. The suit had been running since 1846 and reached the Supreme Court, the country's highest court, in 1856.

In early February 1857, a month before his inauguration, Buchanan wrote to Justice John Catron of Tennessee, an old friend, asking whether the Court would rule before he took office and how broadly. Catron replied within weeks and did something remarkable: he asked the incoming president to lean on a colleague. Justice Robert Grier of Pennsylvania, a member of Buchanan's own party from Buchanan's own state, was the vote that would let the majority avoid looking purely sectional, five southern justices deciding a southern question. Catron suggested Buchanan write to him.

Buchanan did. Grier took the letter to Chief Justice Roger Taney and Justice James Wayne, then wrote back on 23 February with the count, telling Buchanan that six and possibly seven justices would hold the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to be of no effect. The president-elect of the United States was checking vote counts inside the Supreme Court the way other men check a score. Nine days later Buchanan stood in front of the country and called the matter a judicial question in which he had no part.

James Buchanan

15th President, 1857 to 1861

A northern Democrat with southern sympathies, sixty-five at his inauguration, with forty years in public service, including two decades in Congress, two cabinet posts and three foreign missions. Opponents called him a doughface, the era's term for a northerner who voted with the South.

Roger B. Taney

Chief Justice, 1836 to 1864

Wrote the majority opinion in Dred Scott and had sworn Buchanan in two days earlier. A Maryland slaveholder who had freed his own slaves, and the author of the single most discredited opinion in the Court's history.

Dred Scott

Plaintiff, enslaved, c. 1799 to 1858

Lost his case, was privately freed months later by a new owner, and died of tuberculosis the following year. The decision that carries his name outlived him by a decade and was undone only by constitutional amendment after the war.

Stephen A. Douglas

Senator for Illinois, the "Little Giant"

Author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and of popular sovereignty itself, five feet four inches tall, and the most powerful Democrat in the Senate. He broke with Buchanan over Kansas and ran against Abraham Lincoln twice, for the Senate in 1858 and the presidency in 1860.

The ruling, handed down 6 March 1857, held two things. No person of African descent, free or enslaved, could be a citizen of the United States. And Congress had no constitutional power to bar slavery from a territory, which made the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional and void from the beginning.

Two conclusions follow. The narrow one: the ethical breach was real by the standards of the 1850s, not only by ours. Political pressure on a sitting judge in a pending case was understood as improper then, which is why the letters stayed private. The larger one: Buchanan did not merely learn the outcome early. He pushed for a maximalist ruling because he believed a sweeping decision would end the argument permanently. The historian Paul Finkelman puts it flatly. When Buchanan urged the nation to accept the decision, he already knew what Taney would say.

He wanted the broadest possible ruling because he thought finality would produce calm. It produced the opposition party's best recruiting argument instead.

The strategic misjudgment is the part worth dwelling on, and the causal path runs indirectly rather than in a straight line. The decision did not create northern opposition to slavery, which long predated it. What it did was supply evidence for a specific claim northern politicians had been making without much proof: that a "slave power" controlled every branch of the national government. Now there was a ruling striking down a thirty-seven-year-old sectional compromise, delivered by a court whose majority came from slave states, endorsed in advance by an incoming president. That is what moved votes, and it moved them by changing what a moderate northerner could plausibly believe about how the country was run.

William Seward, the senator from New York and the most prominent figure in the young Republican Party before Lincoln eclipsed him, accused Buchanan and the Court from the Senate floor of conspiracy and subversion. Seward went on to become Lincoln's secretary of state, and in 1860 most people expected him rather than Lincoln to be the party's presidential nominee. There is no evidence of the coordinated plot Seward described. The correspondence gave the accusation just enough truth to stick.

One consequence of the ruling shapes everything that follows. If Congress could not bar slavery from a territory, and no federal power could touch slavery inside a state, then for a free-state majority in Kansas a free state constitution was no longer a preference. It was the only lawful instrument left.

Lecompton, and the choice he did not have to make

The Kansas fight is the clearer case, because here Buchanan's own party and his own appointee told him he was wrong and he proceeded anyway.

A proslavery convention meeting in the town of Lecompton in 1857 drafted a state constitution protecting slavery. Free-state settlers, by then a clear majority of the territory, boycotted the process as fraudulent. Investigators later found 1,600 fabricated votes copied from a Cincinnati city directory and another batch of returns hidden in a candle box buried under a woodpile. The referendum the convention offered in December 1857 let voters choose the constitution with slavery or without, but the version without still protected slaves already in the territory and their children, so there was no way to vote slavery out. Free-staters boycotted that too.

Robert J. Walker, the territorial governor Buchanan had appointed himself, concluded the process was a fraud, broke with the administration and resigned rather than endorse it. When Kansans finally got a referendum with the option of rejecting the whole document, on 4 January 1858, they rejected it 10,226 to 138.

Buchanan sent it to Congress on 2 February 1858 with a recommendation that Kansas be admitted as a slave state under it.

Douglas broke with the president in December 1857. By his own later telling, Buchanan threatened to destroy him politically and invoked Andrew Jackson's willingness to crush rebels inside his own party. Douglas told him that General Jackson was dead. He then led the fight on the Senate floor and lost, 33 to 25, on 23 March 1858.

The House of Representatives, the lower chamber, was different. On 1 April 1858, twenty-two of the fifty-three northern Democrats broke with their own president and joined the opposition to kill the bill, 120 to 112. The administration salvaged it with the English Bill, which sent Lecompton back to Kansas voters with a large grant of federal land attached to a yes and a delay of statehood attached to a no. This is where the land grant that came with statehood became an instrument. Kansas said no again in August, by more than six to one.

Two details make the episode worse rather than better. Anti-Lecompton Democrats offered Buchanan a compromise on 29 March 1858: they would vote for statehood if Kansans could amend their constitution immediately rather than waiting the seven years the document specified. He rejected it, for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained.

And in March 1860 the House opened a select committee under John Covode of Pennsylvania to investigate whether the administration had bribed and coerced members over Lecompton. It found no impeachable offence but concluded that the administration was the most corrupt since 1789, meaning since the Constitution took effect, which is to say the worst in the entire history of the national government. Buchanan denounced the report as partisan and claimed complete vindication. Most historians accept a good deal of it, including that his agents offered government jobs and cash for votes.

The cost was structural. His party was the last genuinely national institution left, the only organisation with real strength in both sections. Lecompton split it along exactly the line the party existed to bridge. Two years later it fielded two candidates.

The vote-splitting theory does not survive the arithmetic

A common claim about the election of 1860 is that Lincoln won only because his opposition fragmented, and that a unified anti-Republican ticket would have kept him out. It is wrong, and the margin by which it is wrong is large.

Lincoln took just under 40 per cent of the popular vote and 180 of 303 electoral votes. His three opponents took 123 between them: John Breckinridge 72, John Bell 39, and Douglas just 12 despite finishing second in the popular vote. But Lincoln's support was concentrated where the electoral votes were. He won 173 of his 180 with outright majorities rather than pluralities. Fusion tickets were actually tried against him in New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and New Jersey. He beat the combined opposition in the first three.

A related claim is that three of the four candidates were proslavery. That misreads the field. Breckinridge ran on federal protection of slavery in the territories. Douglas ran as a northern Democrat who had spent three years fighting Buchanan over Kansas and had lost the South for it. Bell ran on the proposition that the slavery question should not be discussed at all. Those are three incompatible positions, which is precisely why no single candidate could have held all three blocs of voters together. The counterfactual assumes an addition that the politics forbade.

What the split did change was the shape of the defeat. Lincoln won without carrying a single southern state and without appearing on the ballot in ten of them. That made his victory legible in the South as a purely sectional imposition, a political fact of real consequence even though it did not alter the arithmetic.

What he thought he was doing

A reasonable question about all of this is why a man who spent four years accommodating the South then spent his last four months resisting it. The answer starts by correcting a common premise: Buchanan never supported secession, the withdrawal of a state from the union. He called it revolution and said that if it were constitutional the union would be a rope of sand.

His one constant across four years was preserving the union without a war. The Court decision and the Kansas constitution were not, in his mind, concessions to disunion. They were his method of preventing it. The theory ran like this. Slavery was constitutionally untouchable where it existed. Northern agitation was therefore the destabilising force, not slavery itself. Give the South every legal thing it was owed, promptly and completely, and the pretext for leaving disappears. He privately called slavery a moral evil and said he was glad his home state had banned it. He still blamed abolitionists for the crisis, and argued that their agitation had killed off gradual emancipation movements in the border states. This is appeasement, not enthusiasm for the institution.

Then in December 1860 the South left anyway, which falsified the theory, and the men who left included his own cabinet and personal friends.

Two things need separating here, because the apparent reversal is mostly an illusion. His doctrine never moved. Buchanan always held that defending federal property was lawful and that forcing a state back into the union was not. That is exactly why he kept the fort in Charleston harbour and refused to march on the city. It is continuity, not conversion. What moved was the room. Buchanan sought consensus from his cabinet and froze when it split. So when the southern members walked out in December and unionists filled their chairs, the same conflict-averse president produced markedly firmer output.

Constant goal, failed method, new advisers. What remains genuinely unresolved is whether the legalism was principle or a lawyer's cover for not wanting to act. That is the central disagreement among his biographers, it is a question about a dead man's interior life rather than about the record, and it is the weakest kind of claim in this report. It is flagged again at the foot.

Why the South did not simply keep the president who was giving it everything

If Buchanan was so accommodating, leaving while he was in office looks self-defeating. It was the opposite. The secessionists were not discarding the accommodation. They were using it as cover.

Their argument was that his last four months were the safest window that would ever exist. A president who held that coercing a state was unconstitutional would not march on them while they organised. That is what happened: seven states out, a constitution written, a provisional president installed, and nearly every federal installation in the Deep South seized, all before Lincoln could take the oath. Seceding under Lincoln would have meant seceding against someone prepared to use force from the first day.

Four reasons the arrangement was not something that could be preserved.

The president was expiring. Buchanan had pledged in his inaugural address to serve a single term and kept the pledge. The friendly administration had a fixed end date of 4 March 1861, and the machinery that had produced the Court decision was about to pass to a party founded to stop slavery's expansion.

Appeasement had a demonstrated ceiling. Lecompton is the proof. A president gave the South everything he had, spent his congressional majority on it, and the House killed it anyway, 120 to 112. Even a maximally friendly executive could not deliver Kansas.

The fear was about trajectory, not present policy. Lincoln promised not to touch slavery where it existed. Congress went further. In the final days of Buchanan's term it passed the Corwin Amendment, a proposed change to the Constitution that would have permanently barred Congress from interfering with slavery in the states, and Buchanan signed it. The seceded states ignored it. What they feared was demographic and permanent: free states entering, the lower chamber gone, the presidency gone, government patronage flowing to opponents of slavery inside the South itself.

Buchanan could not protect anything anyway. He had lost control of his party, lost the House in the 1858 midterm elections, and been the subject of an impeachment inquiry. A departing president atop a collapsed coalition is not a status quo worth defending.

A note on the Corwin Amendment, since it looks like a contradiction

The same Congress that killed Lecompton in 1858 offered to entrench slavery in 1861. That is not a reversal, because they are different questions. Lecompton was about slavery expanding into a new state against its own voters' wishes, and the North said no. Corwin was about slavery staying where it already was, and the North was willing to guarantee it on paper to stop the bleeding. Those two positions together were the Republican platform, and Lincoln stated both in his first inaugural address: slavery must not spread, and he had no lawful power or intention to disturb it where it existed. Two other things had also changed. The 1858 midterms made the House more hostile to expansion, not less. And by the time Corwin came to a vote, southern members had walked out, which reshaped the two-thirds majority it had to clear.

The wait-and-see position was a live southern argument, not a hypothetical. The cooperationists, including Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who would become vice president of the Confederacy, argued for testing Lincoln first. They lost in the Deep South, narrowly in Georgia's popular vote for convention delegates. The states of the Upper South took their side and stayed until April.

Four months, seven states

Here the popular account goes wrong in Buchanan's favour and against him at once.

The sequence matters, because a good deal of loose commentary has southern states raiding federal armouries before the November election. They did not. The first seizure came on 27 December 1860, seven weeks after Lincoln's victory and a week after South Carolina left the union. What is true, and more damning of the secessionists than the earlier claim would be, is that several states seized federal property before their own conventions had voted to secede. Alabama took the armoury at Mount Vernon on 4 January 1861 and the forts guarding Mobile the next day. It seceded on the 11th.

Buchanan's constitutional position, set out on 3 December 1860, has drawn the most ridicule and is usually described imprecisely. He did not say states had a right to leave. He said the opposite: secession was revolution, not a constitutional remedy, and if it were valid the union would be a rope of sand. He then asked whether the Constitution gave Congress power to force a state back in, and answered no. The result was a doctrine under which the act was illegal and the remedy did not exist.

The strongest case for him, made properly

The case usually offered, that the war was inevitable, is the weakest one available. There are three better arguments, and they deserve stating at full strength.

He had almost nothing to fight with. On 30 June 1860 the entire United States Army numbered 1,080 officers and 14,926 enlisted men. Of its 198 line companies, 183 were on frontier duty or in transit, spread across 79 isolated posts. Fifteen were on the Canadian border and the Atlantic coast.

Winfield Scott, commanding general of the armySeventy-four years old in 1860, a veteran of the War of 1812 and the conqueror of Mexico City, and a losing presidential candidate in 1852. In late October 1860 he warned Buchanan that Lincoln's election would probably cost seven states and recommended that nine southern forts be garrisoned at once, while conceding that only about four hundred men were available to do it. Buchanan distrusted him and ignored the advice. Scott later published the recommendation, and the two men later conducted a public argument by letter over who was to blame. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

So the recommendation Buchanan ignored was closer to a gesture than a plan. Ignoring it was still a failure. Scott had also floated the extraordinary suggestion that peaceful division into several republics would be preferable to war, which did the secessionists a favour when it became public in January.

Congress did nothing either. Buchanan asked for guidance and got none. The Senate would not confirm replacements for the federal officers who resigned across the South. The one proposal that cleared both chambers that winter was the Corwin Amendment, which offered to entrench slavery permanently. A legislature that responded to secession that way was not straining at the leash of a timid executive.

He held Sumter. This is what the harsher accounts leave out. When South Carolina demanded evacuation of Charleston harbour after Anderson's move, Buchanan refused, on 28 December 1860. His war secretary resigned over it. In January he sent the Star of the West, and when she was fired on he still did not order Anderson out. Through December he replaced the secessionist wing of his cabinet with hard unionists: John Dix at the Treasury, Joseph Holt at War, and Edwin Stanton, later Lincoln's war secretary, as attorney general. Dix's instruction to a Treasury agent in New Orleans, that anyone hauling down the American flag should be shot on the spot, became a northern rallying cry. Opposition newspapers noticed the shift and said so. Lincoln inherited a fort in Charleston harbour still flying the United States flag, and that fact structured everything that followed in April.

Against all of it sits the simplest rebuttal. Every one of these constraints was real in the winter of 1860. None was operating in February 1857, when Buchanan wrote to Grier, or in February 1858, when he sent a constitution rejected 10,226 to 138 to Congress with his endorsement. The defence works for the last four months and not for the first forty-four.

Checking the popular account, line by line

Several specific assertions circulate whenever this presidency comes up. Sorted against the record they fall into three groups, and the middle group is the interesting one: claims that are structurally right and specifically wrong, or that mislead by sequence rather than by fact.

Where the scholarship actually divides

Buchanan has finished last in every C-SPAN survey of presidential historians since the series began in 2000. He has been dead for a century and a half and is still losing elections. In the most recent, in 2021, 142 historians ranked him 44th of 44 and gave him his worst marks in crisis leadership. The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project survey of political scientists put him 44th of 45. That consensus is unusually stable, and it is a consensus about ranking rather than about explanation.

The scholarly disagreement runs on a different axis. Philip Klein's 1962 biography remains the most sympathetic full treatment, portraying Buchanan as a capable public servant caught in a crisis nobody could have managed and arguing that history has judged him too harshly. Kenneth Stampp, and far more sharply Jean Baker in 2004, represent the dominant modern reading. He did not merely fail to meet the crisis; he deepened it. Baker goes further: his partiality for the South bordered on disloyalty in an officer sworn to defend the whole country. Reviewers of both books note that the bias is easy to spot in each direction.

The counterfactuals historians argue about are narrower than the popular ones. Not whether the war could have been avoided; almost nobody now answers yes to that. The live ones are narrower. What if he had held to his preference for extending the compromise line rather than endorsing Kansas-Nebraska; what if he had used federal authority against the Lecompton fraud instead of for it; what if the forts had been garrisoned in October 1860. Those are all questions about his choices, which is itself the answer to the claim that he had none.

Buchanan gave his own account in 1866, in what is usually counted as the first presidential memoir. He argued that his actions had been legal throughout, that Congress had refused to arm him, and that the crisis was the work of northern abolitionists. He also blamed Anderson and Winfield Scott. The first claim is largely true and the least interesting thing about the record. The last is the tell.

Who is spinning what

The prosecution overreaches by compression. Treating one president as the author of a civil war collapses four decades of causation into four years of decisions. The sectional conflict predated him by generations, and the specific detonator, Lincoln's election, was not his doing. The claim that southern states were seizing armouries before the 1860 election is simply false, and it happens to make him look more passive than the record supports, since he did refuse to surrender Sumter and did try to resupply it.

The defence overreaches by substituting structure for agency. That the war was probably unavoidable by 1857 is a claim about the system. It says nothing about whether a particular president made the system worse, and this one demonstrably did. He was not paralysed by circumstance in February 1857 when he wrote to a Supreme Court justice about a pending case. He was not paralysed in March 1858 when the anti-Lecompton Democrats offered him an exit and he refused it. Those were live choices with contemporaries on both sides of them, and he took the inflammatory option each time. "He was trying to hold the country together" describes his goal, not his method, and the two diverged.

Buchanan spun himself hardest of all, and did it afterwards. In 1866 he recast a series of political decisions as legal constraints, which is the move a lawyer with forty years in the capital would reach for and the one the record least supports.

The honest verdict lands closer to the prosecution than the defence, but for the opposite reason to the one usually given. His worst period is not the secession winter he is mocked for, when his options were genuinely thin and his conduct was better than his reputation. It is 1857 and 1858, when his options were wide open, when his party was still a functioning national institution, and when he spent his political capital breaking it in half over a constitution that 10,226 Kansans had already voted down against 138.

He did not cause the Civil War. He shortened the fuse, on purpose, believing he was putting it out.

Which returns to the question the report opened with, and supplies a test that works outside this case. When a leader says the crisis left them no choice, the check is not whether the crisis was real. It usually is. The check is whether the record shows contemporaries offering them a different option at the time, and what they did with it. Buchanan was offered one by his own territorial governor, by twenty-two members of his own party in the House, and by his commanding general. Three times, the answer is on paper.