1858 (3 page)

Buchanan encountered nothing but problems during his first year in office. It started in the worst possible way when he left his estate at Wheatland, Pennsylvania, for the carriage ride to the capital for the March 4 inaugural. A cold wave had moved in and it had snowed all night; the small crowd that turned out in the freezing weather offered few cheers and the musicians refused to play because their fingers would freeze on their instruments. Following the arrival of his train in Washington, Buchanan was placed in a carriage. The horse suddenly bolted and the president was saved from being dumped on the roadway by an alert coachman who jumped down on top of the horse to calm her.
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Ignoring talent, he selected a “unity” cabinet, with someone for everyone.
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The president named people who had no business running the country, such as the obese, seventy-four-year-old former Democratic presidential nominee Lewis Cass, the secretary of state, who suffered from frequent attacks of vertigo and was often too sick to run his department. Buchanan was told by many that Cass was not healthy and was practically senile. The president even insinuated that to Cass, but was still delighted to give him the most powerful job in the country. He wrote Cass that he had checked with the old man’s friends and that “I am happy, however, to learn from the most authentic sources that you are now as capable of mental labor and physical exertion as you were ten years ago.” Secretary of War John Floyd was a hapless administrator.
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The president became embroiled in feuds with anyone who expressed the slightest displeasure with his cabinet. Some of his critics were among the most powerful men in the country, allies he would need in the years to come. Henry Wise, the governor of Virginia, worried that Buchanan would listen to the men proposed for his centrist cabinet and not make decisions himself. Buchanan might have dismissed the governor’s concerns, but instead snapped at Wise in a long and harsh letter. He wrote him, “Do you in your heart believe that if any one of these gentlemen should be a member of my cabinet I would suffer them to checkmate my best mind? Or have you so little confidence in my nerve to imagine I should submit to such injustice?”
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The cabinet secretaries who were going to steer the country were worked hard by the president, who for several months insisted on exhausting daily cabinet meetings. The secretaries’ view of the chief soon became rather like that of his former aides in other offices. They accused him of harboring a “cold and unimpassioned nature,” of being inflexible and unable to see any point of view but his own.
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They thought him imperious and nicknamed him “the Squire.” They also had no idea what his policies were. Attorney General Jeremiah Black summed it up best when he wrote that, “He is a stubborn old gentleman, very fond of having his own way—and I don’t know what his way is.”
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The tidal wave of forces at work in the 1850s had dramatically changed the nature of national politics. Buchanan was so oblivious to that change that he still believed that a president’s prestige did not depend on domestic accomplishments, but far-off international achievements. Instead of arbitrating the constant battles over slavery, he embarked on a series of questionable foreign policy adventures—the annexation of Cuba, a threatened war in Paraguay—that sometimes took his attention far away from the issue of slavery. He often appeared to be more concerned about Central America than central Kansas, more worried about Nicaragua than New England.

The new president was a bachelor in a city filled with political couples. He had disdained all thoughts of matrimony after an early engagement to Anne Coleman had ended disastrously—she died following a quarrel with him.
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He never showed any interest in marriage after that and spent his time in Washington with bachelors, mostly Southerners. In private life, his single status mattered little, but on the political stage a bachelor chief executive seemed out of place on the Washington social scene. His niece, the gracious and attractive Harriet Lane, lived in the White House with him and served as his hostess, but it was not the same as having a First Lady to entertain public figures and foreign dignitaries.

The president did date many women, bringing them to the White House for state functions or taking them to the homes of friends for dinner parties. He spent lengthy periods of time dressing for these dates, so fastidious in the way he looked that an aide once derisively called him “a masculine Miss Fribble.” At official functions and visits to friends, Buchanan passed himself off as a connoisseur of fine wines, but he was not. An aide joked that all he drank was “his nutty old Madeira.”
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Unsure of himself on the national stage and unwilling to trust many people, he became a hopeless micromanager, spending long hours every night reading paperwork that any other executive would have passed on to underlings. In the spring of 1858, exhausted from it all, he wrote Britain’s Lord Clarendon that he had no time for himself, that he was too busy with work. He told Clarendon that he intended to correspond with him, “but my numerous and pressing engagements have hitherto rendered this almost impossible. I have now scarcely time to say my prayers.” He added that he knew that the chores of the president were time-consuming, but the way he conducted them “the business has increased ten, I may say twentyfold and is now so onerous that no man can very long bear the burden.”
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He told friend Arnold Plumer that he was forced to write him on Sunday, what should have been the president’s day off. “Although I do not write letters on the Sabbath, I have no time to write them on any other day.”
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There was an iron regimen to his workday, too. The president arrived at his office at the White House precisely at 9:00 a.m., never before, and worked until precisely 4:00 p.m. He then took an hour-long walk around the White House grounds, regardless of the weather, dined at exactly 5:00 p.m., except when there was a state dinner, and returned to his office and worked all night. “He often worked just for work’s sake,” insisted niece Annie Buchanan.
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He was a religious man who said his prayers every day, went to church every Sunday, read his Bible often, and refused to permit any dancing in White House events on Sunday or religious holidays.

He was also nosy and pried into the personal lives of his cabinet members, boldly asking one, Howell Cobb, how much money he earned. Buchanan had an acute sense of hearing and claimed that he could hear whispers coming from another room; he often strained to listen to conversations, certain those involved were talking about him. He was even more curious about the love life of his niece Harriet, constantly opening her mail, infuriating her each time he did so.

Buchanan was always ill at ease with people because his unusual physical appearance invariably drew stares. With his neck craned to one side, continual eye squinting, excessively high shirt collars flowing up to his ears, and his tangle of white hair, he looked like an oversized white carrot that had been pulled sideways out of the ground.

He wound up feuding with people who could have helped him over petty disagreements. For years, he snubbed his own vice president, John Breckinridge, whose support he needed, just because Breckinridge socialized with John Forney, an old friend with whom Buchanan had split over a patronage squabble.
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And on top of all that, contaminated water at the opulent, five-story National Hotel, where he lived during the weeks prior to his inauguration, gave him a severe case of stomach disorders. The attacks could not be cured with the primitive elixirs of the day; the diarrhea made him ill and irritable during the crucial first several months of his presidency.
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Just before returning to the United States from England to actively campaign for the presidency in the winter of 1856, Buchanan wrote political operative William Marcy that being president would be “the trial of his life.” He was right.
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Many Americans believed it might be possible for Buchanan to cool the heated and seemingly endless debates over slavery. He was a Pennsylvanian who sided with the South on the legitimacy of slavery and the right of residents in the new territories to determine whether or not they wanted it. He had always felt that way and never hid his feelings, telling those who greeted him just after his election that “the Southern people still cherish a love for the Union; but what to them is even our blessed confederacy, the wisest and the best form of government ever devised by man, if they cannot enjoy its blessing and its benefits without being in constant alarm for their wives and children…[from] the storm of abolition.”
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The electoral votes of the Southern states had carried him into the White House. Buchanan was thankful for that because, he reminded his followers, he received no similar help in the North. He wrote, “The preachers and fanatics of New England had excited the people to such a degree on the slavery question that they generally prayed and preached against me from their pulpits.”
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The Southern firebrands who had threatened to leave the Union if John Fremont was elected seemed placated. Just before the election, the murderous wars over slavery in Kansas had died down following the installation of a new government there.

Buchanan told a crowd of well-wishers gathered at his estate in 1857 that the defeat of both the radical Republicans and the American Party at the polls, along with apparent order in Kansas and the Dred Scott ruling that shattered the Republican claims that Congress could prohibit slavery in new territories, meant that the slavery issue had been pretty much defused. “The night is departing, and the roseate and propitious morn now breaking upon us promises a long day of peace and prosperity for our country,” he whimsically informed the cheering crowd. He also assured the throng that peace was at hand in the territories. “We shall hear no more of bleeding Kansas.”
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Others were not so certain.

Buchanan’s Inaugural Ball was one of the liveliest in Washington history. Handsomely attired men and women in elegant dresses dined on a sumptuous feast and drank until the late hours of the evening. Hundreds of the invited guests whirled about on the dance floor. One of them was the minister from Russia, Baron de Soeckl, with Madame Sartiges, the wife of the French minister, in his arms. He told her that the situation in the United States reminded him of the days just before the French Revolution in 1830. At a party in Paris, France’s prime minister Talleyrand watched dancers float about the ballroom, too. He pulled King Louis aside and whispered to him ominously, “Sire, we are dancing on a volcano.”
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Buchanan was badgered on all sides over the slavery issue and Kansas’s proposed proslavery Lecompton Constitution, so named because it was passed at the town of Lecompton, the territorial capital of Kansas. The strife in Kansas was all anyone talked about. Entire copies of the controversial Lecompton Constitution were printed in the pages of most large daily newspapers and they were filled with letters about it for weeks.
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There was no rest from news about Kansas; newspapers even published stories about the woes of that territory on Christmas Day.
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Feelings on Kansas were so volatile in the nation’s capital, in fact, that the
National Intelligencer
, one of Washington’s leading newspapers, pleaded with its readers on December 28, 1857, to suspend all argument on the subject during the holiday week.
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Instead of trying to broker a compromise on Lecompton and stake out a successful national policy on slavery, President Buchanan dismissed the issue just about every time it came up in conversation. His New Year’s Day reception capped a week of violence between the proslavery and antislavery forces in Kansas that was reported in every major American newspaper, and yet the president never commented on the battles in public. The president did everything he could to swat away the issue, like one would swat away annoying flies in the hot Washington summer.
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Buchanan had no great opposition to the Southerners’ belief that they had a right to protect slavery.
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“I am decidedly in favor of its [Kansas’s] admission and thus terminating the Kansas question,” he wrote in a lengthy message urging congressional approval.
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Defeat of the bill, he argued, “would alarm the fears of the country for the union, reduce the value of property, and injuriously interfere with our reviving trade.”
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Some key Southerners trusted him completely. Congressman Alexander Stephens of Georgia wrote a friend that if Buchanan was elected in 1856, “I do verily believe…there will never be another sectional or slavery struggle in the United States at least in our day.”
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