The Worst President? Meet James Buchanan

0:007 million Californians depend on community health clinics for their care, but Proposition 44 cuts billions from clinics. Under 44, hundreds of clinics will close, and health services will be eliminated. That's why Prop 44 is opposed by nurses, doctors, and patients. Vote no on the clinic shutdown proposition. No, on 44. Add paid for by no on Prop 44. Stop the attack on patients in community health clinics, sponsored by California Primary Care Association Advocates. Add Committee's top funders ultimate health services in California Primary Care Association Advocates. I don't know about you, but I get pretty excited when football season rolls around. That's why I always make a stop at total wine and more before kickoff. Whether it's craft bourbon, cold beer, or ready-to-drink cocktails, it's easy to build a lineup that keeps everyone happy. And when I'm getting everything ready for game day, it's nice knowing I'm getting the lowest prices. Make total wine and more part of your game day tradition. Spirts are not told in Virginia and North Carolina drink responsibly, be 21. This is Meridian Hill Park, my favorite neighborhood park in Washington, D.C. and it is looking beautiful these days. They have resided the lawn,

1:04the stone stairwells, the towering trees, the cascading fountains are working again. It's great about this park as you come here on a quiet weekday morning. People are walking their dogs. In the distance you can faintly hear the traffic on 16th Street, but it's it's serene. I hear those crickets. You can sit and meditate in front of a statue of Dante or Joan of Arc. In the distant southeast corner of the park, there is a bronze statue from a distance it looks like a very important stately figure. And then you approach this statue and you see a name. Buchanan etched above it. James Buchanan, the 15th president of the United States, how did he get a statue here in Washington, D.C.? Well, there's a wayside panel over there, maybe I'll check it out.

2:09So let's see what this panel says. Buchanan was our only bachelor president, relied upon his orphan niece, Harriet Laneed, actresses first lady during his years in the White House, 1857, 1861. In her estate, Harriet Lane Johnson made a request to fund a memorial to her uncle. Well, so that is why we have a statue here. Designed by architect William Gordon Beecher, sculpted by Marilyn artist Han Schuller, the memorial dedicated June 26, 1930, featuring a bronze statue of Buchanan with stone figures of law and diplomacy at each end, representing Buchanan's career in public service. Let's see what it says about his wonderful presidency down here at the bottom. Hostilities in Congress over slavery, abolition and secession made Buchanan's presidency difficult. His was plagued by financial panic and then a revolt of Mormons in 1857, which the

3:10press called the Utah War. On Buchanan's final day as president, March 4, 1861, he remarked to the incoming Lincoln, if you are as happy entering the White House as I shall feel returning to Wheatland, you are a happy man. Jim Oak, welcome back to the show. To be back Martin, as always. Have you ever been to Meridian Hill Park here in Washington, DC? No, unless it was by accident the long time ago. The first time I visited that beautiful park, I saw a big statue and I walked up to the statue and I saw the name inscribed on the marble above it. Buchanan. And I said, wait, James Buchanan, a statue for James Buchanan? Well, you know, until recently I would have said he's in contention for the worst president in American history, but at best the second worst.

4:11I don't know how much you make of presidential ranking lists. I happen to like them as a journalist. They're fun to play around with, like NFL team rankings, right? What is your take on ranking the presidents? I mean, I think we can acknowledge he was a pretty poor leader. I think that's more than enough to say is that he was one of the worst presidents we've ever had, whether you want to rank them specifically or not. But in some ways, it's curious that should be the case because all of his political career up to then would count as distinguished. He went up through the ranks on a trajectory that looked like he was pointing him right to the presidency, you know, starts out. A member of the Pennsylvania legislature moves on to the House of Representatives. Then he becomes minister to Russia. Then he becomes a US senator. Then he becomes minister to Great Britain. And it just looked like he was heading for the presidency. And then he hits the presidency and it's just a disaster from the get go. Yeah, he was what you might call a career politician. And a man who had to have some talents,

5:16not unlike Herbert Hoover, who was a superbly talented and brilliant man, but was a lousy president. Yeah. So who was James Buchan and what were his politics? Well, he was actually born in a log cabin at Cape Raham Lincoln, but his father was a successful real estate speculator in merchant. And so he grew up in a relatively prosperous family in South New Pennsylvania and was well educated, went to Dickinson College and the like. And as I said, he trained as a lawyer and had a very successful practice in Lancaster, looked to be biolacancer, perfectly successful in his private life as well as in his career as a lawyer, as well as a politician. He started his life as a federalist Republican, supported the bank of the United States support internal group. But over the course of the 1820s, he transitioned into Jackson Democrat and stayed that way for the rest of his career. That is, he claimed to support

6:19states rights. He opposed the second bank of the the recharge of the second bank and things like that. So in some ways, he could be considered a typical Northern Democrat. But soon as he got into Congress in the House of Representatives, he began associating with Southern Democrats. By the time you get to the 1850s, he's in some ways not a typical Northern Democrat. The typical Northern Democrat would be Stephen Douglas. And as we know, his whole presidency to some extent floundered on his brutal vicious fight with Stephen Douglas over what the Northern Democrats should be. So he ended up being what they called a dofeist. I'm just about to ask you. What is a dofeist? Dofeist, he was a Northern man with Southern principles. Why? He was from Pennsylvania. So why? It's not at all clear. Like I said, his friends in Washington were Southern Democrats. He started associating with them right from the start.

7:23As soon as he became president, he stacked his cabinet with pro-slavery, southerners, extremists, in many ways. He had already started fighting with Stephen Douglas over control of the Northern Democratic Party. And he wielded the patronage acts with relish and just fired all the pro-Duglus Democrats and just became a complete creature of the Southern Democratic Party. Was he pro-slavery? Yes, he was. He took positions that were antithetical to what Stephen Douglas and the Northern Democrats were. Now some people would say they were pro-slavery, but the position they had staked out for themselves was popular sovereignty. That is, get these slavery issue out of national politics by allowing this territory legislatures to decide for themselves whether they wanted slavery or not. Well, you know, the Dred Scott decision just wiped that out, made that impossible.

8:27It's one of the most famous episodes in the history of Buchanan's presidency begins at his inaugural. Yeah, we're going to get to that. It became clear that he was inappropriately communicating with the Supreme Court about the impending Dred Scott decision. In his inaugural address, he says the Supreme Court will decide this and everybody should obey it. You know, he actually encouraged the Supreme Court to issue abroad rather than a narrow decision, which it did, 20 rewrote the decision. And the result is a disaster. The way it was a disaster, it made, in principle, the Dred Scott decision made popular sovereignty impossible. You know, on popular sovereignty, that sounds like a modern day politician saying, you know, I'm really opposed to this, but I want local people to decide for themselves. So yes, Stephen Douglas pro slavery, well, he would have said, as you mentioned, no, but it should be handled territory by territory. Whereas Buchanan, Buchanan wanted Kansas to come into the union as a slave state. Yes, because that's what the Southern Democrats wanted. Historians

9:33disagree about the moment at which the Buchanan presidency made the crack up of the Democratic party and therefore the election of Lincoln and therefore the Civil War inevitable. And some people say it was the Dred Scott decision. My friend David Blight, Yale thinks that my old dissertation advisor, Ken the stamp thought it was still a conflict, which we can get into. But whatever it was, you know, the position Buchanan took was not the mainstream northern democratic position. It was the increasingly radical pro slavery, Southern democratic position. Look, Compton, briefly, that's a period of time when Kansas had two constitutions. Yes, we think our politics are crazy today. Go ahead. Well, one of the reasons, ironically, one of the reasons that Buchanan got the 1856 Democratic party nominations, because he wasn't here, he was ministered a great Britain during the fight over the Kansas Nebraska Act in 1854. That's the law that Stephen does is introduced and at the behest of Southern Democrats overturned the Missouri compromise,

10:37which kept slavery out of Kansas and Nebraska and turned it into a popular sovereignty territory. That is it allowed slavery in principle by turning the decision over to the territory of the legislation, which is to say the settlers in the territory, whereas the Missouri compromise had banned slavery from that territory. And that's the beginning of the fight over slavery in the territories that never let up over the course of the 1850s. There had been a series of conflicts over slavery in the territories, but this was the big blow up, right? And in 1854, Douglas took the advice of the Southern Democrats and blew up the Missouri compromise and allowed slavery, allowed the possibility of slavery in that territory. That led ultimately to the birth of the Republican Party and the surprising electoral strength showed two years later in 1856. It's the reason Abraham Lincoln came out as an anti-slavery politician famously in the

11:39peoria dress. And so it's, you know, the Kansas Nebraska debacle defined everybody who touched it. Buchanan wasn't there. He was in England. He was a safe candidate for the southerners to support in 1856 because he was already known as somebody who was sympathetic to the south. And he wasn't tainted by any position he had taken during the Kansas Nebraska fight. He was in Europe as minister to Britain. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, he played a large part in drafting the Austin manifesto of 1854. That was a diplomatic report recommending the United States acquire Cuba from Spain to force all any possible uprising of enslaved people there. Buchanan's support for the manifesto stem not only from his fear that a slave uprising might have an inflammatory effect on enslaved people in the United States, but also from his basic belief in American imperialism. This article says apparently he wrote to Congress in 1858. It is beyond question the destiny of our

12:40race, meaning the white race to spread themselves over the continent of North America and this at no distant day. So he was an imperialist too then. Yes, he was an aggressive American expansionist. He wanted to fight for a border further north than the Oregon territory boundary dispute. During the Mexican War, he wanted the US to continue further south beyond the Rio Grande and claim more Mexican territory than it did. And like virtually all prosely of the Southerners and then awful lot of Northerners, he assumed that at some day Cuba would be part of the United States. It's not so much that he wanted for prosely every reason, although he was certainly had no qualms whatsoever about slavery. It's just that he was an expansionist. You know, the Austin manifesto business is interesting because yes, while he was ministered written, he went to Austin and participated in those diplomatic negotiations that led to this manifesto, but the manifesto didn't simply say the United States should buy Cuba for this amount of money in Spain

13:42should sell it to us. It also said or else, if you don't, we're going to take it from you by force. He sort of wasn't willing to go that far, but you know, he went pretty far. He wouldn't fit in in today's administration then as well. Cuba. Yes, that's right. I think the current secretary still here might want Cuba to become part of the United States maybe. You know, this obsession with Cuba is a really good book about the American obsession with Cuba by out of the rare. Cuba and American history that I highly recommend. You know, you never have to listen to ads again. No more interruptions, no more sales pitches. Keep the narrative flow going. Just tap subscribe now in the show notes or go to history as it happens.com to sign up for only $5 a month. You'll get ad free listening early access and all of our bonus content. Again, it's history as it happens.com. 7 million Californians depend on community health clinics for their care, but Proposition 44 cuts billions from clinics under 44. Hundreds of clinics will close and health services will be eliminated.

14:46That's why Prop 44 is opposed by nurses, doctors and patients. Vote no on the clinic shutdown proposition. No, on 44. Add paid for by no on Prop 44. Stop the attack on patients in community health clinics sponsored by California Primary Care Association Advocates. Add committees top funders ultimate health services in California Primary Care Association Advocates. Within every beautifully busy day, there's a brief moment between now and next. A moment made just for you to recharge, refuel and most importantly, bring out the bomb. Bring out the new Bob Evans protein mac and cheese. Bring out the rich, velvety goodness now with 18 grams of protein packed perfection. Bring out the before you ask what's next. Just take one more bite for delicious protein power up. Bring out the Bob Bob Evans new protein macaroni and cheese. I love football season. The games, the rivalries, the food, getting everyone together. No game day feels complete without a trip to total wine and more. I can find everything from cold beer and canned cocktails to wines and spirits for the whole

15:48crew. And if I want to bring something different to the watch party, the total wine team always has ideas. Plus, it's nice knowing I'm getting the lowest prices. Get your game day line up ready at total wine and more. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina drink responsibly B-21. There's a fire inside you you can't ignore. Stand still, not a chance. You're a lifelong learner who's come this far. Now we are here to help you keep going further. Capella University. What can't you do? Visit Capella.edu to learn more. So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you about Buchanan is not just to beat up on a hapless political figure from the past. As you know, as a listener to the show, I do a lot of podcasts about structural causation, agency, presidential decision-making leadership, how leaders try to shape events and how then events constrain leaders. Buchanan is president. It's a two-part question, but it's always wise to ask one part at a time. Buchanan is president in an era before what we call the imperial presidency.

16:54So talking about him coming into office, all these important events have happened and are happening. There's a lot of tension in the country before we get to the mood in the nation. How powerful was James Buchanan or how powerful was the office relative to the other branches at this time? Well, the critique of the Jackson Democrats by the Wigs, by Abraham Lincoln, was that they gave too much power to the presidency. He accepted that willingness, especially on matters of foreign policy, to project the power of the United States through his presidency. He was theoretically as a Democrat, a supporter of states' rights, but in practice, like most of the people who support states' rights, when push came to the show, he was perfectly willing to use the federal government to override. So means doing it. Right. And this is particularly evident in a variety of different ways. We should get back to and pick it up at the Le Compton question,

17:56because this is the logical outcome of the Kansas-Nebraska dispute. Kansas basically goes to war with itself between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers. And by the time he becomes president, it's pretty clear that the majority of the settlers are anti-slavery. When it came to producing a state constitution to send back to Congress in an application for statehood, there were basically two different groups of people. There was the pro-slavery constitution, which we call the Le Compton Constitution, and there was the anti-slavery constitution. And it was very clear to everyone that the Le Compton Constitution was bogus, that it did not reflect the will of the majority of the settlers. Wasn't it written by Ruffians who came across the border from another state? Well, there were a lot of Ruffians who were coming across the border and skewing the results of the elections. But the anti-slavery settlers didn't help by boycotting the elections either. So it made it look like the pro-slavery

18:56settlers did have the majority. But everybody knew that wasn't true, and Stephen Douglas knew wasn't true. And he ended up staking his political career on this principle of popular sovereignty. The Le Compton Constitution is a violation of the principle of popular sovereignty, because we all know the majority of territorial settlers do not want this constitution. And Buchanan took the pro-slavery side and led to this dramatic conflict between Stephen Douglas, the most powerful Northern Democrat, and James Buchanan, the president, under the Democratic president. See, this is a great segue into the second part of my question. I could just say why? Well, the simple answer is because that's what he believed in. You know, I don't want to let Buchanan off the hook by saying, you know, theoretically, yeah, the presidency wasn't as powerful then as it is today. So even if he had really tried harder, he wouldn't have been able to stop the onset of the civil war. Now, I mean, he was making these decisions because this is what he believed in. Yeah. And had he had different positions on these issues, he would not have won the nomination

19:59to his party. Right. He had been in Congress. He had been in the Senate, and he was known among southerners as somebody sympathetic, so they actively supported his nomination in 1856, because they knew he was supportive of their positions. Right. The inconsistency, I suppose you could say, hypocrisy of the state's rights position was obvious in the way he responded to the secession crisis. We have to remember secession happened on his watch. Yeah, I was going to get to that. Go ahead. And his response to it was, well, on the one hand, secession is illegal. But on the other hand, the US government has no power to stop it, to go into the Sunsays. Now, this is somebody who had sent troops into Utah to suppress the Mormon rebellion, who had sent troops into northern states to enforce the fugitive slave law. And all of a sudden, he didn't have the power to send troops into the South to suppress the rebellion. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. I was going to say, you know, from our vantage today,

21:02we know what happens next. A civil war took place. So is it then fair to say, Buchanan should have acted differently because look what he was setting the stage for. He didn't do anything to stop the South from seceding every decision he made, only fuel the flames towards civil war. I actually don't think that's an unfair thing. He was there and you could tell the mood, right? Really, this is the question. Sean Wollens puts it, the chapter of his title about this, a nightmare brewed over society. Buchanan had to be aware as president of the United States. The mood in the country, the tensions at play and that his decisions were having major consequences, right? Right. It's hard to know what's naive and what's cynical in his positions. He wanted, for example, he wanted the Supreme Court to issue a broad decision because he wanted it to silence the slavery issue once and for all. That's not a new position. That's what the compromise of 1850 was supposed to do. That's what popular sovereign he was supposed to do. We shouldn't be talking

22:05about this. It's disruptive of national politics. Move it to the States, let the States and the territories decide for themselves, right? Except that when push comes to shove, he's willing to override that. He was willing to override what the wishes of the territorial settlers in Kansas over slavery. He was willing to, you know, use federal troops in Utah and North. No, he just wasn't willing to use it to suppress the slaveholders rebellion. So in 1857, when he's about to give his inaugural address, what's the mood like in the country? What had it been unreasonable for someone walking down the street in a major American city to say, you know, we're on the precipice possibly of civil war? Well, you know, the 1856 elections were startling because this new anti-slavery Republican party suddenly showed astounding electoral strength. Charles Freyman, so we see the nominee. John C. Freyman. John C. Freyman is the Republican nominee and he,

23:07it would only have taken a few more northern states, which is what was going to happen in 1860 for the Republicans to win. And this was startling because the Republicans were never run a presidential candidate. They were a brand new party in 1856. Nothing like this had ever happened. It's one thing to believe you could silence the debate over slavery in 1850 with this series of compromises. It's one thing to believe that if you just adopt popular sovereignty in the territories, you could silence it in 1854. It's naive, but it's nevertheless theoretically feasible, I suppose. But after the Republicans showing in the 1856 election, the idea that Buchanan could actually believe that a Supreme Court decision could shut down anti-slavery politics had proven to be so powerful is pretty astounding. It's not a particularly small, de-democratic position to think that the Supreme Court could shut down a mass politics like that. So in auguration day,

24:08Buchanan has a conversation with Roger Tony, Supreme Court Chief Justice. And if there had been smartphones, this conversation would have been captured and when I'd ricocheted all over the internet, people would say, what are they talking about? What are they talking about? Well, that happened to newspapers. This was like a scandalous thing that happened. What did they say to each other? And so far as we know, I mean, you alluded to this earlier in our conversation, but I want to really start drilling down now to Buchanan's presidency and how it got off to a terrible start. What happened here with Tony and what were the consequences? Well, the person who matters here is really the Associate Justice Greer, the Pennsylvania Associate Justice. He was the goal between Buchanan and Tony, right? It was Greer who inappropriately told Buchanan what the Supreme Court was up to, the kind of decision it was about to issue in the Dred Scott case. And it was Buchanan who told Greer, who urged Greer to urge Tony and the majority on the court

25:11to issue the broad decision. So in a sense, he did not say anything to Tony at his inaugural dress and the inappropriate and conspiratorial behavior was already in play and wouldn't have changed anything. It's just that his conversation with Tony was a visible manifestation of what was going on behind the scenes and what was about to happen. In a sense, we don't need the transcript, because we know we have the letters of that Greer wrote and that he wrote to Greer. And sure enough, very shortly thereafter, Tony issues this decision that is shocking and everyone just assumes what they saw on inauguration day was part of a conspiracy. And Lincoln famously alludes to that conspiracy in his 1858 House divided speech when John and Roger and the four names of the people involved are seen together and sure does look like a conspiracy. Yeah, Sean Wallenson's book says that those suspicions turned out to be true, even though some people didn't know it at the time,

26:14what we've learned ever since. It was really Don Farron, back in the 1970s and his gigantic book on the Dred Scott's decision that exposed the validity of the conspiracy theory. Just happened to open a page 717 of Sean's book and there's a paragraph here about Stephen Douglas during Buchanan's presidency going to him and saying, you're destroying our party. Our party is splitting. How did Buchanan react to this? We can move from 1857 when there was an economic panic that year, that's never good when you're an incumbent president to 1858, 1859 as the country continues to tell more and more towards break up if not civil war as the Democratic party is visoring. But what's Buchanan doing? He's consistently siding with the Southern Democrats on the issue and eventually he's not moderating his policies at all. But I've thought a lot about this. As I said, there are historians including my own dissertation advisor who think that the conflict over the accompanying constitution between

27:18Stephen Douglas and James Buchanan is the straw that broke the camel's back and made the crack up in 1860 inevitable. The thing about that is if Buchanan had sided with Douglas and opposed the little Compton Constitution, it's hard for me to think to imagine that the crack up at Charleston of the Democratic Party wouldn't have happened. Because that was the crack up between Northern Democrats who would not accept the pro-slavery position, the extreme pro-slavery position, and Southern Democrats. In that sense, Buchanan taken the Stephen Douglas position, it would have made the crack up even more obvious. I'm not sure the fight between Buchanan and Douglas changed the outcome. It was the fact that Douglas becomes the nominee of the Democratic Party and then cannot get his platform as the convention because of the Southern Democrats opposed it. Buchanan promised only serve one term. Yes. By this point, he's not worried about

28:25reelection prospects, but even if he had tried. Buchanan had so alienated the majority of Northern Democrats with his position that they would never have tolerated his presence on the ticket in 1860. In a way, there's an analog with the Lincoln-Duteless debates. The famous debates between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln for the 1858 Senate race in Illinois. These are the debates you need to read to understand the coming of the Civil War. But the truth is that Stephen Douglas was not, he wasn't the Southern Democrat. And so the fight that you see between them doesn't quite get to the fight between Northerners and Southerners over slay for it. In the same way that the fight between Stephen Douglas and James Buchanan doesn't quite get to the thing that's going to crack up the party because it's really going to be Northern Democrats versus Southern Democrats just as the conflict over the Civil War is going to be Northerners and Southerners, not Northern Republicans

29:26and Douglas Democrats. So in 1860, Abraham Lincoln wins the election. The Southern states, led by South Carolina, start seceding. What was Buchanan's view on secession? And more importantly, what did he do about it? What could he have done about it? What he did do about it is easier. What he could have done about it is tough. What he did about it was, as I said before, he takes a split decision. Secession is illegal, but I don't have the power as president. And the federal government doesn't have the power to stop it. You did mention the press. That's the position. And this position makes absolutely no sense to Northern Republicans, especially people coming out of the weak tradition like Abraham Lincoln. If it's illegal than the president, then the federal government has to have the right to have the right in the power to suppress it, to suppress this kind of illegality. It makes no sense to them the position he takes. In that sense, he does nothing. But through the secession crisis, he brings

30:27Stanton into the cabinet who will become a very important member of Lincoln's cabinet. And Stanton persuades him to clean out a lot of those pro-sleeve extremists from his cabinet. He sort of fumbles his way through. I guess he has figured out that the pro-sleeve extremists are a real problem, but he doesn't know how to get out of it. He just knows that he'd better detach himself from these pro-sleeve extremists that he's surrounded himself with for a long time. You know, and he does attempt to reinforce for something. So he's not completely inactive, but he doesn't really know what to do about this. I think he's just waiting to get out of office. Yeah, it's not like he had a standing army because eventually force is necessary at some point. There was an incident involving a ship called the Star of the West during Buchanan. Yeah, that's his attempt to reinforce for something or at least provide supplies. Didn't the southerners open fire on the Star of the West?

31:29Yeah, they turned it back at the entrance to Charleston Harbor. It had to turn around. So what does Buchanan do then? Nothing. Oh, he didn't have drones or anything. But still, I mean, he's the president of the United States. The American ship is going to reinforce a union or an American, a US fort. It's fired upon and he does nothing. He's a Democrat, right? He could never have gotten his own party. He could have got northern Democrats to support some action, but he could never have gotten his own party to really support that. He would have had to turn to Republicans. Yeah, because before the new Congress takes over in 1861, we're still on the old one. There aren't that many Republicans in there, right? It's all Democrats. There are Republicans, but they're not nearly enough. Even if the south had not seceded, despite the huge Republican victory in 1860, they wouldn't have had control of Congress either. The reason we have Republican control of Congress isn't simply because they were victorious in 1860,

32:32but because 11th, 7th states seceded and their votes were gone. It's a curious thing that a minority of Americans, a majority of Northerners, but a minority of Americans prosecuted the Civil War and that slavery abolished. But it was not a Democratic majority that did that. Thanks to the absence of 11th, 7th states. They were warned, as we've discussed in the past, southerners were warned by just about everybody on the other side of that issue, that if you leave the union, you doom slavery. Yeah, that's what the Republicans were saying. The Democratic position was, this is a fake issue. They're drumming up a lot of hysteria about slavery. They're irresponsible. They're causing succession. That's even no less a position right for something. It's not until they seceded that he sort of turns around and says, all right, we're not going to go there. You can't break up the union for this. Well, I mean, you can still think that the Republicans caused the war in a sense. But you can't even... I want to say...

33:32Not a secessionist didn't support secession, as you mentioned, but it's hard to call him a unionist either. No. He didn't lift a finger to save the union. I often think, well, everybody thinks today that our politics are just nuts. But as we've been discussing here, there were two Democratic conventions in 1860, because the pro-slavery folks walked out. I don't know what would be the equivalent today in 2024, members of the Democratic Party who opposed the Biden administration's positions in Gaza, for instance, walking out, holding their own convention, enominating a separate candidate, because there were two Democratic candidates, one in the North, one in the South, in 1860, and a constitutional unionist, John C. Bell, and then Abraham Lincoln. He wasn't even on the ballot in the South. All right, back to Buchanan's position, in terms of the slavery issue in 1860, was the extreme pro-slavery position. That is, he endorsed the idea that there was a constitutional right of property and slaves in the territories. That is the pro-slavery

34:36position. I just opened a book on this. That is antithetical to the Northern Democrat position, which is that if it's constitutionally protected right, then popular sovereignty doesn't work. Popular legislature in the territories cannot overturn a constitutional right. So, Douglas doesn't want to go there. And that's the reason for the crack-up in Charleston in 1860. The Northern Democrats were not going to take that position, because if they did, their position on slavery in the territories doesn't have any meaning. Whereas Buchanan actually went there and took the pro-slavery position, said that slavery is a constitutional right. They have a constitutional right to slavery in the territories. That is, diametrically opposed position of the Republican Party, and the Northern Democrats really don't want to go there, because they know what it means. You know, you never have to listen to ads again. No more interruptions, no more sales pitches. Keep the narrative flow going. Just tap subscribe now in the show notes, or go to historyazadhappens.com to sign up.

35:41For only $5 a month, you'll get ad-free listening, early access, and all of our bonus content. Again, it's historyazadhappens.com. The games, the rivalries, the food, getting everyone together, no game day feels complete without a trip to total wine and more. I can find everything from cold beer and canned cocktails to wines and spirits for the whole crew. And if I want to bring something different to the watch party, the total wine team always has ideas. Plus, it's nice knowing I'm getting the lowest prices. Get your game day lineup ready at total wine and more. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina, drink

36:46responsibly B-21. You've never been one to settle. Stand down or stand still. You're a life-long learner, energized by excellence. There's a fire inside you. You can't ignore. You've got competition to outrun, momentum to build on, and your own high standards to meet. Stop now? Not a chance. At Capella University, we help you catch what you're chasing because you've always had the drive. Now, go earn the degree. Capella University, what can't you do? Visit Capella.edu to learn more. You know, on the importance of ideas, I was just mentioning I have your book here, Freedom National, the destruction of slavery in the United States, 1861 to 1865, opening to page 56, the importance of ideas, property rights, and what the Constitution says or does not say. You say here, the Republican consensus that there was no right of property and slaves dampen the prospect of a meaningful, sectional compromise. And we are talking about the secession

37:48winter. So we're already off the deep end. You write in his much-awaited annual address to Congress in December 1860. And man, was there a long lame duck period in those days, six months? President James Buchanan proposed a series of constitutional amendments, the first of which echoing the Dred Scott decision, the grant express recognition of the right of property and slaves in the state's for slavery already exists as well as in all the common territories of the United States. This was slavery national, you wrote, wherever the Constitution was sovereign, slavery was protected. Was this Buchanan's last best shot to make a difference in all this drama or no? I guess so. I mean, it's kind of pathetic. And he would take that position at that particular time, but yeah. The horse was already out of the barn at that point, but yeah. Once Abraham Lincoln is elected, the war is inevitable. The conflict over that issue of slave property is so fundamental, so foundational. Both the pro-slavery and the anti-slavery positions,

38:51all of the pro-slavery and anti-slavery positions hinge on those two different understandings of the property, right? If slavery is constitutionally protected right of property, then Northern states must act to protect that right by returning fugitive slaves and no being the Constitution. The Northern states must allow slavery into the territories. It's unconstitutional for them not to. Congress cannot abolish slavery in Washington DC because they may have sovereign power over Washington DC, but you can't pass a law that violates a constitutional right. Whereas the anti-slavery position all depends on the denial of such a right. You can abolish slavery in Washington DC because it isn't constitutionally protected as a right of property. You can ban from territories because it's not protected as a right of property. You can suppress it on the high seas because once they leave the state from which the slave ships have departed, they're in open waters and they are now controlled by the law of nations or the US Constitution, which does not recognize a right of property in slaves. We can protect the due process right of accused

39:54fugitives because they are not property, they're persons under the Constitution. So the anti-slavery positions in the pro-slavery positions all hinge on this powerful difference over whether there's a right of property in slaves. Lincoln had made his position very, very clear in the Cooper Union address in early 1860, which is not an nomination. So for Buchanan to take that position was the most thorough repudiation of the anti-slavery position, but even this Stephen Douglas Northern Democrat position makes it untenable. He's right there with Tony in the Supreme Court in 1857. What do we learn from this? What do we learn from the follies and the tragedies of the presidency of one James Buchanan? One lesson I take away is while timing is everything. Abraham Lincoln was the right person at the right time. Just doesn't happen by accident, of course. Buchanan was the wrong person at the wrong time. Set aside everything he did before secession. When he had an opportunity to save the Union, he failed utterly to lead the country. It's not clear what he could

40:57have done except what Lincoln did, basically declared. Yeah, that's true. That is true. I guess he didn't want to spill blood. I mean, that's understandable. Lincoln could do it because he knew he had the backing of the majority of party in Congress. I'm not sure Buchanan could have done that. So why then does Buchanan belong near the bottom of our imaginary ranking here? Well, because he did allow the Northern Democratic Party to split apart. He took these unacceptable, ridiculous positions on the Constitution of Kansas. He was on the wrong side of history. He was on the wrong side. He was on the wrong side. Because we've talked about historical events in terms of chronology trying to explain what happened and why it happened. But we also talk about who's actually right about the issues and who was on the right side of history. James Buchanan was on the wrong side of history. And maybe I should put that in graffiti above the statue in the nearby park. I'm more interested in reconstructing the conflict, but I have to say that if Bush comes to show, I think the evidence now is accumulating

42:03that the anti-slavery position on slavery as a right of property was correct. This goes back to Buchanan's slavery in the Constitutional Convention and showing that there were attempts to get a right of property in slaves into the Constitution and that they failed. And they failed because no of them just didn't want it. Didn't want there to be such a thing. And there is no real argument coming from southerners that there is a constitutional right of property in slaves having lost it at the Constitutional Convention. They don't really start pushing that argument again until 1820 where they reinterpret the Constitution. Where is the northern position all along? From 1787 on is that there is no constitutional right of property in slaves and they act on that. So the new more radical position is the pro-slavery position. And it becomes increasingly radical. So what happens between 1856 and 1860, which you alluded to before, isn't simply that the northern position isn't anti-slavery position isn't yet consolidated. It's that the southern position is

43:09becoming still more radical. By the late 1850s, the southerners aren't simply saying that southerners have a right to bring their slaves into the territories. They are now saying that as the Constitution right, the federal government is obligated to protect slavery in the territories. And if the territory legislature fails to pass a slave code, which is what Stephen Douglas, Stephen Douglas got around the Dred Scott decision by saying, okay, we can't ban slavery from the territories, but slavery can't survive if there's no slave codes. And if the territory legislature just won't pass a slave code, there's never going to be slavery in the territories. And the response by the pro-slavery southerners was okay then, the federal government is obliged to actually pass a slave code. That's a much more radical position. The idea that the Constitution as a property right in slaves is a radical position different from 1787. So it's the increasing radicalism of the pro-slavery position that is pushing the north into a more aggressive anti-slavery position. Both sides are

44:11radicalizing, but the pro-slavery position has really moved much, much further from 1787 than the anti-slavery position. After all, in the 1780s, the northern position was ban slavery from all the territories. Northern position on future dissapce was the three dissapce have a right to do process. We have the states have a right to protect the do process right. That position is there consistently from the 1780s to the 1860s, right? Whereas the pro-slavery position is becoming increasingly radical, increasingly radical, and alienating more and more and more northerners. So last thing here, at the very beginning, you said until recently, you can in might have been ranked at the very, very bottom, but now he's the second worst. So the worst then, Richard Nixon, or were you making a comment about current events there, Mr. Oaks? I was making a comment about current events. I want to say this to the television audience. I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited

45:18from public service. I've earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think too that I could say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their presidents are crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got. On the next episode of History as It Happens, it is back to the greater Middle East, as we take a historical perspective, the rise and fall of political Islam. That is next, as we report history as it happens. In the meantime, sign up for my free newsletter, just go to Substack and search for the name of this podcast. You keep going further, Capella University. What can't you do? Visit capella.edu to learn more.