Happy Birthday President Buchanan

James Buchanan was born on April 23, 1791 close to Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. His father was Scotch-Irish and came to the Pennsylvania frontier where he became a successful storekeeper. James Buchanan attended school in Mercersburg before entering Dickinson College in the fall of 1807 as a junior. He was among the best scholars in his class, but he also acquired a reputation for rowdiness and intellectual vanity. When he graduated two years later, he left the college with little emotional attachment.

Eager to improve his situation, Buchanan trained for the law and was admitted to the bar in 1812. His considerable legal skill brought him acclaim and a growing income. It also drew him into politics. A Federalist like his father, Buchanan began his political career in 1814 as a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

In 1819, Buchanan became engaged to Ann Caroline Coleman, the daughter of a wealthy iron mogul. Their engagement was an unhappy one, however, and amidst rumors that Buchanan was seeing other women, Coleman broke off the engagement. She died shortly thereafter, leaving Buchanan brokenhearted, and her family to blame him for her death, to the point that they would not let him attend her funeral. Buchanan vowed to never remarry, and he never did.

In 1820 he was elected to Congress. With only a few exceptions, he spent the next forty years as an officeholder, serving as both congressman and senator, as minister to Russia under President Andrew Jackson, as secretary of state during the presidency of James K. Polk, and as minister to Great Britain under Franklin Pierce. In 1856, at the age of sixty-five, he capped this long list of honors with his election as President.

That year, the Democratic National Convention was held in Cincinnati, Ohio. Buchanan won the Democratic nomination on the 17th ballot.

In the general election, he defeated John C. Fremont, the first Republican presidencial  attempts to prevent it, on December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede. By February 1861, six more states followed suit and the Confederate States of America was formed  as Buchanan served out the last months as a lame duck president.

When Lincoln was sworn in as president and  Buchanan left office on March 3, 1861, to retire to his estate outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he left the nation on the brink of civil war.

The man who said: “All for which the slave States have ever contended, is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way. As sovereign States, they, and they alone, are responsible before God and the world for the slavery existing among them. For this the people of the North are not more responsible and have no more fight to interfere than with similar institutions in Russia or in Brazil,” lived to see the end of the Civil War. Just before his death in 1868, he said, “History will vindicate my memory from every unjust aspersion.”

I am not sure that will ever happen....