James Buchanan and the Civil War

[ReijiTabibito]

My vote for worst President is James Buchanan.  Man could have averted the Civil War, spared half a million plus American lives (Americans - so good at killing that when we turned our guns on each other, we killed more than in every other war combined!), and potentially brought a peaceful resolution to slavery.

[Vekseid]

There was never going to be a peaceful resolution to slavery. There wasn't even a peaceful resolution to coexistence, because the South was far too belligerent to let its murderous antics continue.

[Tolvo]

I would say he was a bad president still, but more so incompetent. The Civil War was going to happen. The others were more so intentionally horrible and genocidal. Though I admit Buchanan is someone I've not studied as much as the others, though that is because his impacts seem not as significant. Which might be due to me just not having read much about him.

[ReijiTabibito]

The Civil War began - at least at that time - due to the election of Lincoln, which led to Southern secession.  However, it is important to recognize that two prior events that directly involved Buchanan would not have made Lincoln's 1860 election divisive to the point of secession, if even possible, and a third (which did not) making a nonviolent resolution impossible.

Through the 1850s, Kansas sought to join the US.  As part of its application process, it needed to send the state constitution to Congress for approval.  Kansas was hotly contested between pro-slavery and anti-slavery (NOT abolitionist, they are not the same thing) elements.  As a result of this division, two constitutions were sent to Congress, one from each side: the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution, and the anti-slavery Topeka Constitution.

Similar to Kansas, the singular national party at this time - the Democrats (the Republicans were still coalescing at this time, from elements of disparate other parties that would soon vanish into the ether of history) - were divided over the question of slavery.  The Northern Democrats, represented by men like Stephen Douglas, espoused 'popular sovereignty' - the basic notion that each state could decide for itself whether or not to be a slave state.  The Southern Democrats, or Fire-Eaters as they were called at the time, were represented by men like John C. Calhoun (though Calhoun was dead by the time this was happening, having died in 1850), who were against such notions.

When both constitutions reached Washington, Democrats were split on the issue - Douglas and a key portion of Northern Democrats came out against the Lecompton Constitution, but Buchanan made the mistake of endorsing the Lecompton Constitution to try and placate the Fire-Eaters, who he feared losing.  When Kansas residents was finally voted on Topeka vs Lecompton, the latter didn't even stand a chance, barely garnering over 100 votes compared to the 10,000 for Topeka.

That began a schism that erupted full-force in the election of 1860, where the two Democrat candidates were Douglas and John C. Breckinridge - North and South.  Douglas technically won the nomination, but the Fire-Eaters refused to allow him as their candidate, despite having identical positions on every issue save the protection of slavery to his Southern rival.  Breckinridge was Buchanan's VP, and supposedly Douglas had done something to earn Buchanan's ire, so he endorsed Breckinridge over Buchanan, which divided the party and enabled Lincoln's ascent to the White House.

Buchanan could have simply done the opposite of what he did in both cases.  This would have angered the Fire-Eaters, but would have isolated them within the country and made it clear that pro-slavery policies could not be enforced upon the North.

The final (?) straw that broke the camel's back was...technically the first one?  Chronologically, anyways, but it's considered one of the historically worst decisions rendered by SCOTUS - the Dred Scott case.  While the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had been in effect for several years prior to Dred Scott, historically persons in the North ignored it; Vermont established a state judicial process for handling cases of accused escaped slaves, rendering the Act unenforceable there.  The state of Wisconsin even voted to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act in 1855, declaring it unconstitutional.  Men in the North who were put on trial for violations of the law routinely benefited from jury nullification.

That changed with Dred Scott, in which Chief Justice Taney declared outright that blacks were "altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that [he] might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it."  (That is a direct quotation from the decision.  No edits bar inappropriate language.)  This was entirely different from every other decision made with regards to slavery, because those decisions concerned themselves with slaves alone, and not with the status of freedmen within the nation's borders.  More importantly, Dred Scott put the stake through the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which drew the famous 36-30 parallel that determined whether a given state would be a free or slave state.

Remember how I said anti-slavery was not abolition?  Here's where I come back to explain this bit.  Abolitionists were for the total dissolution of the institution of slavery.  Anti-slavery advocates were people who simply did not want slavery to be a part of their state's laws and constitution.  This was key in the West because it was seen as the place for economic mobility and to continue the pioneer spirit of the nation (as the phrase "How the West was Won" codified).  People moving there did not want to have to compete against slave labor.

So now, after Dred Scott guts Missouri, all that crap that had happened with Kansas?  That was now going to happen with every state that sought admission to the US because the Fire-Eaters feared the inevitable conclusion that had been staring them down for the last 40 years, since the Missouri Compromise, and now was accelerating due to Douglas and the Northern Democrat embrace of popular sovereignty: that one day, the Southern slaveholding states would not constitute enough presence within the Congress to stop them from outlawing slavery, at the agitation of abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison.

Even if you argue that the CW was bound to happen, eventually, anyways, despite what could have been done, that doesn't excuse the fact that Buchanan openly appeased the Fire-Eaters, enabling their notions of secession, emboldening them to push harder, and he could have done otherwise.

[Tolvo]

Your description of events states that it was inevitable and that Buchanan had a minor impact, only hypothetically riling up the Fire-Eaters with appeasement. Though the Fire-Eaters were always going to do this explicitly. Lincoln was going to win. So by your accounts without Buchanan appeasing them the rest of the events which sparked the war would have gone the same. Also why did you say there was a singular political party in the USA which was the Democrats? The Whig's were heavily involved in a lot of these events. The Republican Party was around in the 1850's. This would also still be the fault of slave owners and those wishing to use their political and economic power to control and influence other regions, such as was the desire of many slave owners an Southern State governments. The Northern states also wanted to influence the Southern states as well, but still one group wanted to use slaves for said power and reestablish international slavery.

[Vekseid]

Are you seriously arguing that if Buchanan had been anti-slave or abolitionist that the South would have been cowed or something?

Bleeding Kansas began before Buchanan's election. That and the other rampant violence perpetrated by the South makes me seriously question the notion that anyone who thinks "Buchanan could have stopped the Civil War if only x" themselves would have been able to stop the Civil War even with the gift of 21st-century foresight into the matter. A fair bit of the violence was because of many northern states thumbing their noses at the Fugitive Slave Act in one form or another, and this also began before Buchanan's election. They were extremely belligerent, and the idea that they would just back down at the North squeezing out slavery is ludicrous.

[Tolvo]

In general it's hard to have a single person decide whether a war begins or ends. Even something like World More 1 a small group of people decided more so the specific date, World War 1 was pretty heavily set up it was inevitable something would set off the chain reaction. Usually the entire timeline of the past 50-100 years decides whether a war is going to happen, sometimes its honestly surprising more so when the war doesn't start sooner.

[TheGlyphstone]

I feel like this is becoming a tangent worthy of its own thread...

[Tolvo]

True, more so a Civil War thread if going into the specifics of that or a Presidents Thread. Though I'm not sure if there is much more to say really. I really only meant to comment about the hyperbole people use sometimes for how bad the current president is given the context of the USA's entire history. Not that Trump isn't bad just that we have had quite a lot of other bad and morally repugnant presidents. And how he is still pretty up there regarding unethical and hateful presidents but that we should remember there were many others like that.

[Vekseid]

I feel like this is becoming a tangent worthy of its own thread...

Done.

[LostInTheMist]

Buchanan was a bad president mainly because of a couple of things. He couldn't make his mind up on secession. He thought that it was unconstitutional for a state to secede from the Union, but he didn't believe that the Federal government had the authority to intervene. That's like saying that the police have the right to note down that the guy stealing your television is committing a crime, but not having the authority to arrest him.

He was also a Democrat (the pro-slavery party at the time; the opposite of nowadays) in a country where Republicans (the anti-slavery party at the time; the opposite of nowadays) had just become the dominant political force. He became president at the moment when the North finally had the votes they needed to abolish slavery. Note that this was not out of any altruistic motives by much of the North. They knew that many former slaves would flee from the South and provide a cheap labor force for the factories and industries of the North. (I mean, it's a LOT more complicated than that, but I don't want this to turn into a social studies lecture. Various tariffs imposed in previous administrations, and other situations made the Civil War pretty much inevitable.)

But, Buchanan could have cut if off at the knees and made the Northern victory a lot easier, and a lot less costly in American lives. If he had acted to prevent the Civil War's beginnings, he could possibly had saved 500,000 American lives. But most of his support came from the South, and he lacked the... gumption... to act against them.

He was a bad president, but also the victim of bad circumstances.

Hoover was also a pretty bad president.

[Regina Minx]

I am bemused by the fact that two presidents warrant their own named threads in the PROC board. The current one (justified and currently-relevant)...and James Buchanan. :D

[Oniya]

This one got split off from the other one as it developed into a highly detailed, but off-topic tangent.  It was presumed that folks wanted to talk about it.