Buchanan consistently ranks bottom in lists of "best presidents". In January, Nate Silver, the star statistician whose election predictions have gained mythical status, revealed a poll of polls that placed Buchanan 43rd out of 43 presidents. For his critics, who say he caused both his country and the Democratic Party to fall apart, that's where he belongs.
It's not an attempt to contradict the standard portrayal of Buchanan as one of the least effective presidents, says co-author Michael Birkner. But it does try to get people to argue about him a bit more, and reassess what he did well and did badly.
The other point of view is that he exercised prudence in not provoking war, because like Lincoln he understood it would be easier to rouse the North to fight if the South started it.
Buchanan was born in Cove Gap, Pennsylvania, in , but aged 18 settled in Lancaster, where the city still takes great pride in his achievements. Some of his possessions, including his presidential desk, were recently returned to Wheatland , just outside Lancaster, where Buchanan lived before and after his single-term presidency. Buchanan made his fair share of mistakes but Congress and the judiciary did too, says Clarke, who nominates Warren G Harding as the worst US president, because of the corruption scandals that plagued his term of office.
One of the main criticisms of Buchanan concerns his attitude to slavery. As you probably know, Lincoln did not run on an abolitionist platform. His sin, in the eyes of the slaveocracy, was that he was opposed to allowing the spread of slavery into the new western states that were being admitted into the Union. And he obviously failed to get ahead of it. One could go deeper into the question of what Buchanan might have done to resolve or postpone or reduce the crisis before it had to be resolved by secession and Civil War.
House, the U. Senate, as a U. House, before stepping into the White House and facing immediately the greatest crisis in U. Most people think he did pretty well. According to Goucher College professor and " James Buchanan " author Jean Baker, we can't just dismiss Buchanan as an ineffective and incompetent leader. She says that the problems with his tenure weren't due to age — at the age of 65, Buchanan was one of the oldest US presidents to take office — and health concerns, either.
Buchanan was no political novice. What's more, Baker says that Buchanan wasn't passive early in his presidency when it came to issues that didn't involve slavery, the issue that Thomas Jefferson once called "the fire bell in the night.
He also proved proficient at stuffing the government with what Baker calls "partisan hacks," through the system of patronage. Buchanan's downfall as a leader came from his clear bias toward the South. This partiality became obvious early on in his presidency. According an article by Michael Todd Landis in the Journal of the Civil War Era , Buchanan's initial Cabinet "consisted of four Southerners, one elderly Northern statesman quite agreeable to Southerners, and two additional Northern men who were considered doughfaces.
In the end, Buchanan's cabinet did not even represent a range of interests and opinions within the Democratic party, much less the nation.
Grant wrote in his memoirs. That's why they were behaving the way they were. They saw more and more that they were going to lose the Electoral College and indeed they lost it in to Abraham Lincoln.
So why was the Cove Gap, Pennsylvania native so sympathetic to Southern sensibilities in the first place? Well, Buchanan may not have necessarily had pro-slavery views, but he viewed Northern abolitionists as more dangerous to the Union than slave-owners themselves.
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