Buchanan not a tough act to follow for Biden as 2nd president from Pennsylvania - TribLIVE

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Some say he was the worst president in U.S. history.

Pennsylvania’s James Buchanan served as the 15th president of the United States from 1857 until 1861. Historians consistently rank him at or near the bottom of the list of presidents. His failure to deal with the secession movement is considered, according to a 2006 Associated Press survey of historians, the worst presidential mistake ever made.

Despite Pennsylvania’s prominent role in the American Revolution and the founding of the United States, the Keystone State had produced only one U.S. president before this election.

Buchanan held that distinction for 163 years before Joe Biden, who was born in Scranton, became president-elect. As the second U.S. president from the Keystone State, the consensus is that Biden does not have big shoes to fill when it comes to his Pennsylvania predecessor.

A bit of a hell-raiser

James Buchanan was the last president to be born in the 18th century. He was born April 23, 1791, in Cove Gap, Franklin County. It is now Buchanan’s Birthplace State Park.

By the time he got to college, Buchanan had developed a bit of a wild streak. He attended Dickinson College in Carlisle and was nearly expelled at one point for bad behavior.

“That’s where young Jimmy Buchanan got his first taste of rye whiskey. And he liked it,” said Patrick Clarke, director of President James Buchanan’s Wheatland (the farm Buchanan bought in 1848) in Lancaster.

“He was also a very precocious young man and treated a number of his professors as though he was much more intelligent than they were,” Clarke said. “He was brought up on charges that he was unruly and did not have good manners.”

Only after pleading for a second chance did Buchanan subsequently graduate from Dickinson — with honors.

He became a prominent lawyer and won election to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives as a Federalist. In 1820, he was elected to the U.S. House and became a U.S. senator in 1834.

Buchanan’s strength was foreign policy. He served as ambassador to Russia and the United Kingdom as well as secretary of state under President James K. Polk.

Dumbfounded about slavery

When he settled into the White House in 1857, the most pressing issues were domestic ones, especially slavery and the threat of Southern states to secede from the Union because of it.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, Buchanan was regarded as a Northerner with Southern sympathies.

“The thing about Buchanan was he understood other countries better than he understood his own nation,” Clarke said. “He was very good at foreign policy. The problem was that domestic issues were a heck of a lot more important.

“He just didn’t know what to do when trying to solve what he called ‘the problems the North was causing the Southern gentlemen,’ and, at the same time, he was making statements about how ‘secession is a horrible thing. These secessionists are crazy. It’s going to bring about the end of our union.’ ”

Yet despite knowing what was coming, Buchanan was dumbfounded when it came to figuring out what to do about it.

“When he was in Congress he said, ‘I thank the Lord that I live in a state where we don’t have to worry about slavery because it’s illegal in the state of Pennsylvania,’ ” Clarke said. “But here he was as president of the United States, and he had the power to affect something in a positive way, but he wouldn’t take it on.

“He just didn’t have the imagination to figure out how the hell to do it.”

Lacking coherent logic

By the time Buchanan left office in 1861, keeping a promise to serve only one term, he had left a ticking time bomb for his successor, Abraham Lincoln.

The Civil War began just over a month after Lincoln took office. But Kristen Coopie, director of Pre-Law at Duquesne University and an authority on presidential history, said it’s not fair to put all the blame on Buchanan.

“If there is anything we have learned over the history of our country, it’s that the president is a unitary actor. There were so many things going on in the country that it wasn’t just his inaction,” Coopie said. “Buchanan’s biggest issue is he picks and chooses when to be president and when to let the states act on their own accord, and he really doesn’t have a coherent logic.”

She cites as an example Buchanan’s mismanagement of a series of violent confrontations in the Kansas Territory in the late 1850s, which emerged from a political debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas.

“Buchanan wants Kansas admitted, but he doesn’t care if it’s slave or free,” she said. “He wants the states to make their own decision. But this is where we get Bloody Kansas. There are actual battles.”

Some 200 people were killed in the Kansas violence. The episode was considered a prelude to the Civil War.

And yet, as Coopie points out, Buchanan didn’t hesitate to send U.S. forces to the Utah Territory to put down the Mormon Rebellion, a chapter some historians refer to as “Buchanan’s Blunder.”

“He’s more than happy to step in when the Mormons lead an uprising in Utah, but he wants to back off when it comes to states actually seceding from the Union,” Coopie said. “When you have a president and a Congress that are only willing to step in at certain times, they’re not setting guideposts for what should be happening in the country.”

Bachelor president

In some ways, Buchanan had a more noteworthy private life. He was the only president to remain a lifelong bachelor.

This has led to plenty of speculation over the years that he was gay, asexual or celibate. Clarke disagrees with this speculation, saying Buchanan appeared to have “chased a lot of women” but never found the right one.

At the White House, his niece, Harriet Lane, filled the role of first lady.

Presidential legacy

When it comes to Buchanan’s presidential legacy, Clarke calls it a failure of leadership.

“The guy had an incredible resume. How could he step into the presidency and be such a loser? But he was. He had no managerial skills whatsoever,” Clarke said. “He chose a cabinet that were like him: country lawyers who harkened back to the days of the Missouri Compromise and Jacksonian Democracy’s heyday.

”This was a different nation. The country had become a completely different population of Americans, and he was completely out of touch with what a majority of Americans wanted.”

Here’s hoping that a President Joe Biden, a child of Scranton, turns out to be a little more enlightened than James Buchanan.

Paul Guggenheimer is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Paul at 724-226-7706 or pguggenheimer@triblive.com.

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Buchanan not a tough act to follow for Biden as 2nd president from Pennsylvania - TribLIVE

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