James Buchanan: Be careful what you wish for

Leadership lessons of the presidents

By the time James Buchanan was inaugurated in March 1857, the issue of slavery had been tying American politics in knots for three-quarters of a century. Congress had been unable to resolve the contradiction between the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence and the egregious inequality of slavery permitted under the Constitution. Presidents had been no more successful.

Which left only the third branch of government, the judiciary, headed by the Supreme Court, to rescue America from the deepening rift slavery was creating between North and South.

Such a conclusion came naturally to Roger Taney. The chief justice could be expected to look to himself and his black-robed brethren to accomplish what the legislative and executive branches had been unable to accomplish.

It was more surprising that Buchanan, with no institutional interest in elevating the judiciary, came to the same conclusion. In fact Buchanan’s interest was simply in finding a solution that the country would accept as definitive. Congress lacked the legitimacy to do so, having divided into northern and southern factions. The same sectionalism had undermined the presidency as well. Buchanan only narrowly defeated John Fremont, the nominee of the new and purely northern Republican party. Anyway, the president couldn't act on slavery independent of Congress.

But the Supreme Court could. And Buchanan wanted to ensure that it did. A case pending before the court provided an opportunity to answer a question crucial to the future of slavery: Would slavery be allowed in the western territories before they became states? Some of them? All of them? If some but not others, who would decide?

Congress had assumed the authority in 1820 in a compromise surrounding the admission of Missouri as a state. The compromise decreed that Missouri would enter the Union as a slave state but the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of the southern boundary of Missouri would remain forever free. No one was completely happy with the compromise — this being the nature of compromises — but it was broadly accepted as a matter of settled law.

Until, that is, it was overturned by the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which created territorial governments for those two districts under the principle of popular sovereignty. Though Kansas and Nebraska were in the free part of the Louisiana Purchase, the new law allowed slaveholders to take their slaves into the territories. When each territory became populous enough to warrant statehood, the residents would vote for a state constitution permitting or forbidding slavery.

The case before the Supreme Court in early 1857 involved a slave named Dred Scott who claimed freedom on the basis of having lived in a territory designated as free by Congress. The court might have decided the case narrowly, but Roger Taney and James Buchanan hoped to employ a decision in the case to answer the general question of slavery in the territories.

Neither Taney nor Buchanan was an apologist for slaveholders. Taney had owned slaves as a young man in Maryland, but he had come to consider the institution corrosive of democratic values. He emancipated his slaves and provided pensions for those too old to find paid work. Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian, never owned slaves and, like Taney, judged the institution injurious to republicanism.

But both men realized that their views were not shared in the slave states, which grew more and more attached to slavery the more it was attacked by northern abolitionists. A resolution of the slavery question that didn't satisfy the South would be no resolution at all. It would inflame the South and likely destroy the Union.

Buchanan in particular believed that slavery was a dying institution. If the Union could be held together for another decade or two, slavery would be ended by decision of the southern states themselves, and all would be well.

The Constitution calls for a separation of powers among the three branches. Congress, the president and the Supreme Court should each mind its own business. The Constitution says nothing about the role of presidents-elect. In the weeks before his inauguration, Buchanan employed the loophole to probe the thinking of Taney and the other justices regarding the Dred Scott case. They satisfied him that the court would issue a definitive ruling on slavery in the territories, one denying Congress the authority to bar slavery there.

Buchanan kept what he learned to himself. In his inaugural address he expressed his preference for leaving the fate of slavery in the territories to the people there, yet he deferred to the third branch. “It is a judicial question, which legitimately belongs to the Supreme Court of the United States, before whom it is now pending, and will, it is understood, be speedily and finally settled,” he said. “To their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be.”

Buchanan looked forward to the moment of decision. “May we not, then, hope that the long agitation on this subject is approaching its end, and that the geographical parties to which it has given birth, so much dreaded by the Father of his Country, will speedily become extinct? Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance.”

Buchanan’s words were intended to enhance the legitimacy of the decision the Supreme Court rendered two days later. Instead they gravely damaged his own legitimacy. The decision was an even greater victory for the South than Buchanan had anticipated, and his pre-endorsement made him appear complicit in it. Not only did the court say that Congress had no power to keep slavery out of the territories, it declared that black people were not and never could be citizens. Buchanan became the archetype of the “doughface,” a northerner who abandoned principles to curry the favor of the South.

The Dred Scott decision energized the Republican party and revived the political career of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln and the Republicans condemned the Dred Scott decision as emblematic of the insufferable arrogance of the South. Lincoln denounced Buchanan as an agent of the southern design to dominate the national government.

Buchanan had hoped for a clear decision on slavery, believing clarity would lead to calm. He got what he hoped for but not what he believed. The Dred Scott decision produced not calm but greater turmoil, culminating before long in the Civil War.