Douglas fielded a formidable organization of fixers, financiers, and delegate wranglers. “Much depends on Virginia,” he declared on May 14. He also counted on Indiana. And he staked all on New York through a deal with Dean Richmond, the New York Central Railroad vice president and power within the Empire State Democratic Party. In Virginia, however, Governor Henry A. Wise despised Pierce, mistrusted Douglas’s tactical alliance with him, and believed Douglas would not be a strong candidate in the South because of his doctrine of popular sovereignty, which theoretically at least provided the basis to deny as well as to open the spread of slavery. There was no available Southerner. The Northern-Southern “doughface,” “Old Buck,” was an easy choice for Wise. “I have no idea that any slave-holding Democrat can get the next or any nomination for the presidency,” wrote Wise. “Our policy is to go in for Buchanan with all our might.” (Virginia was lost to Douglas.)
Douglas convinced himself he could rely on support from Senator Jesse Bright of Indiana, the Hoosier political boss, who belligerently represented the state in the interests of slavery. A classmate of Jefferson Davis at Transylvania College, a political ally of the F Street Mess, he owned a plantation and slaves in Kentucky, where he spent much of his time. For all intents and purposes, he behaved as a Southern slaveholder, which he was. He was fiercely jealous of Douglas as a rival for dominance of the Northwest within the Democratic Party and stabbed him in the back in the 1852 nomination battle, throwing Indiana’s delegates to Senator Lewis Cass, who could not win, in order to destroy Douglas. Since then Douglas had courted him, even bringing him into a lucrative investment syndicate he created to buy real estate at Superior City in Wisconsin for a terminus of a northern route of a transcontinental railroad. Despite showering Bright with attention and riches, Senator David Yulee of Florida warned Douglas in 1853, “He is your enemy. . . . He does not mean that you shall rise if he can prevent it.” Yet Douglas thought he had won him over. “Bright is acting in good faith to you,” one of Douglas’s operatives assured him. Meanwhile, Buchanan’s handlers promised Bright control of federal patronage for the Northwest.
Few men had more distinguished résumés in public life than James Buchanan. He had served at every level of government from the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to the U.S. House and Senate. He had turned down an offer of sitting on the Supreme Court from President John Tyler. He had been a statesman: minister to Russia, secretary of state, and minister to England. He had nearly been the Democratic nominee in 1852 and was a contender in 1848 and 1844. His manner was courtly, his image dignified. He was genteel, proud, and stubborn. He had survived over decades in political controversy since the administration of James Madison. The greatest of his irreducible assets was that he was from Pennsylvania, the Keystone State, the swing state of the North. The Democrats always needed Pennsylvania, and Buchanan stood for Pennsylvania. His survival in its factional bramble was his chief recommendation. Pennsylvania was his ultimate platform.
Buchanan’s plodding ambition had previously been a dead weight. He had accumulated a lifetime of political baggage. But magically none of that mattered. It was not Franklin Pierce’s or Stephen A. Douglas’s baggage. Buchanan’s great good fortune was to have been exiled to his ambassadorship in London, where he was preserved unscathed from the political wars. Buchanan had not changed at all, but resurrected from his entombment.
Through a strange political alchemy his dross turned into gold. He was everything the charismatic, exciting, and impulsive Douglas was not. On his fourth attempt for the nomination, his extensive résumé, thorough mediocrity, seeming predictability, and Pennsylvania background made him alluring. Buchanan’s enduring quality was his availability. The party did not want the vigorous young man; it sought someone old, tired, and dull. Buchanan’s chief recommendation was his absence of certain qualities: originality, independence, and daring. “He was the personification of evasion, the embodiment of an inducement to dodge,” wrote the journalist Halstead. Buchanan’s recommendation as the most experienced and qualified man for the presidency was enhanced by his negative capability. Buchanan’s leadenness made him seem steady, stable, and secure. He was the right man at the right time because this time he wasn’t the wrong man. Four years earlier Douglas had derided the older candidates for the nomination as “old fogies.” Now the age of the old fogy dawned.
“Mr. Buchanan,” President James K. Polk wrote in his diary, “is an able man, but in small matters without judgment and sometimes acts like an old maid.” When former president Andrew Jackson objected to Polk naming Buchanan secretary of state, Polk pointed out to Jackson that he had appointed him minister to Russia. “It was as far as I could send him out of my sight and where he could do the least harm. I would have sent him to the North Pole if we had kept a minister there,” Jackson replied.
Henry Clay intensely disliked him, once sarcastically dismissing him by remarking “he had made no allusion to the Senator from Pennsylvania. He was referring to the leaders, not to the subordinates of the Democracy.” Jackson referred to Buchanan and his intimate friend, Senator William Rufus King, with whom he shared quarters, as “Miss Fancy” and “Miss Nancy.” When President Franklin Pierce offered Buchanan the post of minister to England he first accepted but then wished he had rejected it, dithered, and finally went. Pierce’s secretary of state, William L. Marcy, observed that “the truth is old bachelors as well as young maids do not always know their own minds. But if he ever meant to go he can assign no sufficient cause for changing his mind.”
Buchanan was briefly engaged to the daughter of a wealthy iron manufacturer, but she accused him of holding “affection” only for her “riches.” When she died shortly after breaking off the engagement her family barred Buchanan from the funeral. They were always opposed to the match. There were no more engagements. His close and long friendship with his boardinghouse mate Senator King, a wealthy Alabama plantation owner, had the benefit of having a Southerner promoting his prospects to other Southerners. Governor Aaron V. Brown of Tennessee, President Polk’s former law partner, whom Buchanan would name his postmaster general, referred to the two men as “Buchanan and his wife.” “Mr. Buchanan looks gloomy and dissatisfied,” Brown wrote Polk’s wife, Sarah, “and so did his better half until a little private flattery and a certain newspaper puff which you doubtless noticed, excited hopes that by getting a divorce she might set up again the world to some tolerable advantage.” In 1840, Buchanan had promoted King as Martin Van Buren’s running mate. According to his plan, to which King happily acceded, King would serve four years, announce he would not run for the presidential nomination, and endorse Buchanan. Four years later, Buchanan advanced King’s name for vice president. After Polk appointed King as minister to France, King wrote Buchanan, “I am selfish enough to hope you will not be able to procure an associate who will cause you to feel no regret at our separation.” When Buchanan lost his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1852, he declined the offer of the vice presidency and offered King in his place, the gambit of the original scheme. Finally, King was nominated. But Vice President King died forty-five days into the Pierce presidency, leaving Buchanan disconsolate. He described his relationship with King as a “communion,” and wrote one of his confidants, “I am now ‘solitary and alone,’ having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them.” Buchanan’s emotional attachment to the South and preserving slavery were entangled with his emotional attachment to King.
The highest accolade that Senator Henry S. Foote of Mississippi could bestow on Buchanan was his talent for “cronyship.” Buchanan, he wrote,
was not known to deliver a single speech remarkable either for eloquence, for potential reasoning, or for valuable practical illustration. He was notably deficient both in ingenuity and in rhetorical brilliancy. I do not think he ever uttered a genuine witticism in his life. . . . Nobody, though, ever heard him talk stupidly or ign
orantly; and whenever a subject chanced to be introduced with which he felt himself to be unacquainted he had the good sense to be obdurately and unmovedly silent. . . . He was, as a general thing, exceedingly truthful and confiding, and delighted more than any public man I have known in what is sometimes called “cronyship,” but, unfortunately, selected often as the special partners of his counsels men of very small mental caliber and who had recommended themselves to his regard mainly by their adroitness in the arts of adulation, to the influence of which arts he was indeed most lamentably open.
Buchanan had always been a boilerplate partisan, a stalwart Federalist congressman for four terms before he became a stalwart Democrat. He had periodically announced his retirement from politics since 1830 with an air of exhaustion. He held his utterly conventional views stubbornly until he instantly changed them to fit the circumstances, but he gradually lagged farther and farther behind events, and he had to be prodded to adjust them to stay politically viable. The more detached he became, the more tightly he clung to his anachronistic ideas. He conflated political change with personal offense. Change made him irritated. If he had one lasting position it was his genuine hostility to antislavery advocates, and if he advocated one paramount issue it was the Fugitive Slave Act. Pennsylvania had a long, porous border with the slave state of Maryland, making it a staging ground for the Underground Railroad and a flash point for skirmishes over runaway slaves. The notorious Christiana Riot—a gun battle between abolitionists harboring fugitives and a slave owner seeking the lawful return of his property, ending in his being killed—took place only fifteen miles from Buchanan’s residence. The Fugitive Slave Act was close to home.
Buchanan had become a world-weary old gentleman long ago. He lived as a wealthy country squire on his expansive estate in a mansion of twenty-two rooms with a carriage house and other buildings in the village of Wheatland, outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He adopted the nickname bestowed on him in the Democratic newspapers—“the Old Public Functionary,” even self-referentially calling himself “OPF.” The “OPF” also touted himself as “the Sage of Wheatland.”
His head tilted to the left side from an eye defect; one of his drooping eyelids twitched. He was myopic, would not wear glasses and tried to focus by squinting. One of his eyes was blue, the other hazel. His angled gaze sometimes gave an impression that he was listening attentively. “Difficulties often arose when those who thought they were close to him realized that they had been reading his looks rather than his mind, and such persons would break off with a sense of personal injury,” wrote a biographer, Philip S. Klein.
Buchanan was pedantic, recording his valet’s expenditures down to the penny, and worried about others’ appearances, once to his detriment chiding President Jackson that he hoped he would wear a proper suit in meeting a lady. Over time he became overweight and fussier about his dress. He wore the formal clothes from the early years of the century with a high white collar, a white tie, and black dress coat, which set off his nimbus of white hair. He favored white silk handkerchiefs and white silk stockings. He was self-conscious about his small feet and wore black patent leather shoes.
His tastes were epicurean. He enjoyed fine food and good vintages. He famously drank copious amounts of champagne, whiskey, sherry, wine, and Madeira. After downing two bottles of cognac, finished off with rye whiskey, his longtime associate John W. Forney observed, “There was no headache, no faltering steps, no flushed cheek. Oh, no! All was as cool, calm and cautious and watchful as in the beginning.” But Buchanan’s consumption of alcohol gave him gout.
He appeared hale and hearty in company, though his health was generally not good. He grew polyps in his nose and on his neck, which he had removed by rudimentary surgery. He suffered from heart disease and hardening arteries, which likely intensified his inflexibility, vanity, and petulance when others objected to his indeterminacy or hesitantly reached decisions. From his long experience in government he was confident in his judgments, becoming dogged when challenged and obstinate when overrun by events. His vacillation would be finally followed by paralysis. He would treat his cabinet, members of the Congress, and other political figures as subordinates. “Behind his back they called him ‘the Squire,’ in half-jocular recognition of his success in imposing this inferiority upon them,” wrote the historian Roy Franklin Nichols.
Senator John Slidell of Louisiana, indeed sly, strategic, and avaricious, guided Buchanan’s every step to his nomination. Slidell wrote the script, a series of tableaux vivant of Buchanan posing as a statesmanlike icon. “Mr. Slidell,” recalled Forney, “was a man of the world and a scheming politician, yet never a statesman. He had some reputation as a lawyer, but not as an advocate or pleader. Few men had more influence over James Buchanan, and none did so much to mislead that ill-starred President. His rule was implacable hostility to all who did not agree with him. He was faithful to those who followed him, but his prejudices always dominated his friendships. He had undoubted courage, but his mistake was a belief that the best way to adjust a dispute was by an appeal to the ‘code of honor.’ ” Slidell, according to W.H. Howard, the correspondent for the London Times, was “a man of iron will and strong passions, who loves the excitement of combinations . . . and who in his dungeon . . . would conspire with the mice against the cat sooner than not conspire at all.”
Slidell was born a New Yorker but left to find his fortune in New Orleans, where he established a lucrative law practice and ruthlessly pursued a political career. His law partner, Judah P. Benjamin, just as cunning, became the other senator from Louisiana. Slidell’s niece, Caroline Slidell Perry, was the daughter of Commodore Matthew Perry, who opened trade to Japan. Her husband, August Belmont, was the Wall Street agent of the Rothschild banking interests and a Democratic Party funder. Slidell served as his political mentor.
John Slidell
In 1853, Slidell proposed a bill for the invasion and seizure of Cuba. At the same time he lined up Belmont in the bond markets to making a financial killing on the policy. He corresponded with Buchanan, who was behind the Ostend Manifesto of 1854, a parallel document that would threaten Spain with war if it failed to relinquish Cuba, but which the Pierce administration scuttled. Slidell broke with Pierce over his refusal to provoke Spain. (Slidell had been Polk’s plenipotentiary to Mexico and helped manipulate events that led to war.) The rupture turned bitter when Pierce ousted Slidell’s ally as the U.S. attorney in New Orleans who prosecuted Pierce’s appointed postmaster for corruption.
In October 1854, a month before the Democratic defeats in the midterm elections, Slidell launched plans for the Buchanan candidacy. “We have abundant time to clear the wreck and repair damages before the presidential election,” he wrote Buchanan. He coaxed a reluctant Buchanan to run, told him how long to stay in London, when to return to the United States, what to say, and when to say it.
At Slidell’s direction Buchanan circulated a letter on the eve of the convention emphasizing his credentials. His politics were frozen to the point in time when he had left for his post in England. He was still on record in favor of the Missouri Compromise, which was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Now he wrote, “I have written and spoken more than any man now alive in favor of the just Constitutional rights of the South over their slaves.” He added that “the Morning Advertiser, a British liberal paper . . . more than once expressed its regret that I was such ‘a strong pro slavery man.’ ” Buchanan was touted as “the strongest northern man sound on Southern principles,” according to Congressman J. Glancy Jones, chief of the Democratic political machine in Pennsylvania.
On the convention’s eve a rumor swept through the political salons of Washington that Douglas and Pierce had conspired to drop out in favor of another candidate, perhaps Senator Robert M.T. Hunter of Virginia or Senator Thomas Jefferson Rusk of Texas. Douglas had offered Hunter the chance to be his vice president in the 1852 nomination struggle. The banker W.W. Corcoran, who had been a source of funds for Douglas’s
political and financial projects, but was now with Buchanan, told the rumor to Bright. Buchanan’s complacent handlers rushed to Cincinnati.
The Buchaneers, as they called themselves, consisted of four senators—Slidell, Benjamin, James A. Bayard of Delaware, and Jesse Bright. They set up camp at the house of Samuel Latham Mitchill Barlow, at the age of thirty one of the wealthiest and most influential Wall Street lawyers, who had temporarily established himself in the Queen City to arrange the completion of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad. Though a native of Massachusetts, Barlow was a proslavery Democrat. When he was not in Ohio, he lived in a luxurious double brownstone on the corner of Madison and Forty-third Street where he collected art and Democrats. Through his connections he was at that moment securing a strategic job for a former army officer, George B. McClellan, as the superintendent of the Illinois Central Railroad, which Barlow intended to link to the Ohio and Mississippi line. It was the beginning of a relationship that would culminate in McClellan’s 1864 candidacy against President Lincoln.
Breaking down Douglas began with Indiana. He thought he had it wrapped up. But at the delegation meeting on the Saturday night before the convention Bright enforced his fiat. Buchanan had 16 votes to Douglas’s 10. Bright imposed the unit rule and they all went for Buchanan. “Indiana is all gone—and wrong,” Congressman William Richardson of Illinois, Douglas’s convention manager, telegraphed him. “To Bright’s indomitable energy we are indebted for . . . the coup d’état which gave us the vote of Indiana in convention,” wrote Forney. After the election, when the jobs began to be doled out and his influence was dismissed, Douglas discovered the full depth of Bright’s treachery. Just as he betrayed Pierce, he too was betrayed. His embittered collision with Buchanan was therefore set into the foundation of Buchanan’s rise.
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