Review: James Buchanan

James Buchanan by Jean H. Baker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Odd how the most prepared person "since James Madison" to run for president could end up being such a terrible president. His undoing seems to be due to:

1) Like previous presidents, he backed slavery (despite being a Northerner). This puts him on the wrong side of history, as well as being a testimony to how blind people can be to basic fundamentals of life. However, his obvious siding with the South and slave states appalled Northerners, making many of them more sympathetic to the Republican cause.
2) Extreme corruption in his cabinet. Here again, it seems odd, since he himself seems to have been so well-versed in law and politics. Although, maybe the "politics" part was a disadvantage. There seems to have been an attitude that "the ends justify the means" in order to get things done, which, in his case, was silencing the "vocal minority" of abolitionists. Of course, by the end of his presidency this was no longer a minority. He also let his cabinet members, all of whom shared his views, do more or less as they pleased.
3) Following these two points, his cabinet consisted in Southerners and dough-faced Northerners (Northerner sympathetic to Southerners). In the meantime, pro-slavery southerners were becoming a smaller and smaller minority, which is why they started getting louder and louder. He didn't realize the real "vocal minority" was the Southern slave-holders.

Some people say the Civil war wasn't about slavery. His presidency and this book show it very obviously was. States Rights are only brought up during these years in relation to slavery. Let's not forget that it's a small minority of white men who even owned slaves, but they seem to have had all the power. In fact, as can be been with the Missouri compromise, the Wilmot Proviso and the fugitive slave act, these same "pro-states rights" people suddenly wanted Federal law to supersede when it came to slaves going to other states.

I found this book quite good. I think it's often difficult to write a biography of someone like Buchanan. After spending so much time researching one person, you end up either justifying all their bad decisions, or just concentrating on their bad points and reviling them. But this book seemed to do a good job of pointing out how bad he was without covering up or pushing the matter too much.

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