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“Old Mother Buchanan at Wheatland"
No caption.
With
the onset of the Civil War in April 1861, popular sentiment in the North
turned decidedly against James Buchanan, the former president who had
served during the secession crisis of late 1860 and early 1861.
On July 4, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech,
based largely on information from General Winfield Scott,
condemning the previous Buchanan administration for leaving large
amounts of federal armaments and money in the rebel states of the South.
After the Union defeat at the Battle
of Bull Run in
late July, a Senate resolution of censure against Buchanan as an alleged
Confederate sympathizer gained widespread publicity, but did not pass.
In addition, newspapers published General Scott’s critical and
largely fanciful version of events during the final months of the
Buchanan administration. In
October 1862, Buchanan defended his actions in an exchange of public
letters with Scott.
Here, the cartoonist takes
Buchanan’s verbal self-defense as a cowardly action comparable to
Shakespeare’s villainous Richard III.
The lifelong bachelor is portrayed as “Old Mother Buchanan,”
who is tormented at his Wheatland estate by the knowledge that Americans
are experiencing wartime suffering and deprivations that he supposedly
could have prevented. The
text compares him to a murderer, perjurer, villain, and coward, and his
conscience appears as a frightened black cat.
Meanwhile, Buchanan stubbornly and desperately defends himself by
blaming others, notably his secretary of war, John Floyd, who had
supported secession and was serving in the Confederate Army. On the floor (left) are three volumes of Buchanan’s
biography, the first draft of which he had completed in October 1862.
The one-volume Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of
the Rebellion was published in 1866, but is here labeled as a
ten-volume work in order to emphasis the former president’s alleged
tendency to defend himself at length.
James Buchanan was born on
April 23, 1791, near Mercersburg, Pennsylvania.
He attended school at a local academy, and then nearby Dickinson
College, graduating in 1809. He
studied law in Lancaster and was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar in
1812. He proved to be a
successful lawyer and an astute investor, quickly accumulating
substantial wealth. Buchanan
entered politics at an early age, serving in the Pennsylvania
legislature (1814-1816) as a Federalist and in the U.S. House of
Representatives (1821-1831). He
eventually became a Democrat and a supporter of President Andrew
Jackson, who appointed him to be the U.S. minister to Russia
(1832-1833).
After he returned to America at
the end of Jackson’s second term, the Pennsylvania legislature elected
Buchanan to the U.S. Senate. His closest friends were Southerners and he took a
Pro-Southern position on most sectional issues, including slavery. He believed that the institution of slavery was legally and
constitutionally protected, and he endorsed the exclusion of
abolitionist materials from the U.S. mails, the gag rule that tabled
antislavery petitions to Congress, and the annexation of Texas as a
slave state.
Buchanan was a candidate for
the Democratic presidential nomination in 1844, but a deadlocked
convention turned to dark horse candidate James K. Polk.
After Polk became president, he appointed Buchanan as his
secretary of state, but, dismayed with the Pennsylvanian’s
indecisiveness, Polk largely administered foreign policy himself.
In 1848 and 1852 Buchanan again unsuccessfully sought his
party’s presidential nomination.
Although he hoped to serve as secretary of state once more under
President Franklin Pierce, he was assigned to the post of minister to
Great Britain. Buchanan
gained notoriety in his new position when he and the American ministers
to Spain and France met in Ostend, Belgium, in 1854 to draft a policy
recommendation for President Pierce.
They suggested that the United States try to buy Cuba and, if
Spain was unwilling, to seize the island by force.
When the Ostend Manifesto was leaked to the press, it created a
furor among Northerners who feared Cuba would become another slave
state.
Buchanan resigned as minister
to Great Britain in early 1856 and returned to the United States in
order to secure the Democratic presidential nomination.
This time, he was successful.
He went on to win the presidency with a plurality of the vote
against two other candidates, Republican John C. Fremont and American
(Know Nothing) Millard Fillmore. Some
Southerners had threatened to secede if Fremont won the election, since
the Republican opposed the expansion of slavery into Western
territories. Therefore,
during his presidential term, Buchanan attempted to appease Southern
concerns in order to preserve the union.
Buchanan’s presidential
policies, however, only contributed to more sectional animosity.
In the interim between his election and inauguration, Buchanan
tried to exert undue influence on one of the Supreme Court justices who
was deciding the Dred Scot case. The
decision, announced two days after his inauguration, affirmed in
sweeping terms the Southern view that neither the federal nor
territorial government could ban slavery in the territories.
Although the president thought the decision would settle the
matter, it further exacerbated sectional tensions, including those
within the Democratic Party, and strengthened the Republican Party.
Buchanan’s handling of the
slavery issue in the Kansas territory also widened the divide between
northern and southern Democrats. To
the dismay of Stephen Douglas, leader of the Northern wing of the party,
Buchanan endorsed the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution.
Submitted to Congress by a rump legislature, it would have
allowed Kansas to enter the union as a slave state, against the wishes
of the anti-slavery majority in the territory.
The Buchanan administration did everything it could to ensure
passage, including a resort to bribery.
While the Senate approved the Lecompton Constitution, the House
narrowly rejected it after a bitter fight.
The damage done to the Democratic Party and national unity was
almost irreparable.
President Buchanan pursued an
expansionist foreign policy, stoking Republican fears of a political
conspiracy to expand slavery. His
administration failed in attempts to purchase Alaska and Cuba and to
impose a protectorate on northern Mexico, but did secure trade treaties
with China and Japan. The Buchanan presidency was plagued by a series of scandals,
making his administration one of the most corrupt in American history.
An economic depression also undermined the president’s
popularity.
Because Senator Douglas had
broken publicly with Buchanan over the Lecompton Constitution, President
Buchanan worked behind the scenes to derail the senator’s reelection
in 1858. Douglas prevailed,
but discord with the Democratic Party increased.
The final break came at the 1860 Democratic National Convention
in Charleston, South Carolina. Buchanan aides joined forces with Southern radicals to stop
Douglas’s nomination for president.
After the convention failed to endorse a federal slave code for
the territories, the Southern delegates walked out and reconvened in
Richmond to nominate Vice President John Breckinridge for president.
The Northern Democrats met in Baltimore and nominated Douglas.
The split in the Democratic Party allowed the Republican
candidate, Abraham Lincoln, to win the presidency.
When seven states of the Deep
South left the union after Lincoln’s election, Buchanan condemned
Northern antislavery agitators. The
lame-duck president denied both a constitutional right to secede and the
constitutional authority of the president to intervene and stop the
process. Instead, he called
for a constitutional convention to draft amendments protecting slavery
in the South and in the territories.
Yet, Buchanan remained a unionist and would not recognize the
Confederate seizure of federal property.
After the Star of the West, an unarmed merchant ship, was fired upon while
attempting to resupply Fort Sumter, Buchanan took no further provocative
action and handed the precarious situation over to the incoming
president, Abraham Lincoln.
Buchanan
retired to his Wheatland estate outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
where he died on June 1, 1868.
Robert C. Kennedy
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