What’s a prez to do? Buchanan and secession

James Buchanan was a rare president who announced at the start of his first term that he wouldn’t run again. In doing so he made himself that endangered species of democracy, the “lame duck.” The label comes from the 18th century and signifies an injured member of a flock, a bird that becomes a target for hawks and other predators. Initially applied in the world of finance, where creditors were the ones to watch out for, it extrapolated to politics to signify a president who couldn’t or wouldn’t defend himself at the next election.

At the time he spoke—March 1857—Buchanan couldn’t know how consequential his lame-duckdom would be for the country. The Supreme Court was about to deliver its decision in the Dred Scott case, which would throw opponents of slavery into despair by decreeing that the Constitution prevented Congress from keeping slavery out of the federal territories in the West. The court’s decision overturned nearly four decades of settled law on slavery; moreover, the logic beneath the decision suggested that the court might soon decree that the Constitution prevented the northern states from keeping slavery off their own soil. The thought of slavery being reintroduced in New England and New York and Pennsylvania sent people there into a panic.

The South experienced its own panic in 1859 when abolitionist John Brown led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an effort to trigger an armed rebellion of slaves. The attack failed, and Brown was executed for treason against Virginia. The fact of the raid was sufficient cause for alarm, in southern opinion; what made matters much worse was that many northerners treated Brown as a hero and a martyr. Large numbers of southerners concluded they could not safely remain under the same government that nurtured Brown and his bloody-minded supporters.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 pushed several southern states over the edge. Lincoln’s party, the new Republicans (not to be confused with the Jeffersonian Republicans of the 1790s and shortly after), was avowedly antislavery. Lincoln professed not to believe he had the authority to rid the South of slavery, but many southerners didn’t believe him. In the weeks and few months after the election, but before Lincoln’s inauguration, seven southern states proclaimed their separation from the Union.

James Buchanan had to decide what to do. Buchanan was a northerner, a Pennsylvanian. He was not a slaveholder and not an apologist for the institution. At the same time, he was a Democrat and sufficiently broad-minded on the subject of slavery not to have caused the southern members of that party to prevent his nomination in 1856.

And he was a lame duck. Whatever course he chose, he would be able to pursue it for mere weeks before having to step aside for Lincoln. If he decided to take military action against secession, the army he would have to summon into existence would still be mustering when his time ran out.

Lincoln offered no help. The president-elect, after having spoken loudly in the campaign against a constitutional right of secession, fell strangely silent as South Carolina and the other six states asserted and acted on that very right. Lincoln seemed to be saying: Buchanan, the problem is yours until March 4, 1861.

Buchanan agreed with Lincoln that secession was unconstitutional. He said so quite clearly. “The right of the people of a single State to absolve themselves at will and without the consent of the other States from their most solemn obligations, and hazard the liberties and happiness of the millions composing this Union, can not be acknowledged,” he declared. “Secession is neither more nor less than revolution.”

So what would he do in response to the proclamations of secession? Amid a crisis in the early 1830s, when South Carolina threatened to secede over a tariff measure it didn’t like, Andrew Jackson threatened to march an army into the state and hang any secessionists—traitors, he called them—he could lay hands on. Would Buchanan issue similar threats? Would he summon an army to defeat secession?

Buchanan was not Jackson. He’d never held military command. And there was that problem of timing, of not having enough weeks left in office to implement any decisive military response.

Moreover, Buchanan took a more limited view of the powers of the president. Just as the Constitution, by his reading, forbade secession, so it constrained the president’s response to attempted secession. “The power to make war against a State is at variance with the whole spirit and intent of the Constitution,” he said. And even if a president had the authority to wage war to preserve the Union, the exercise of that authority—the waging of war against secession—would do more harm than good to the Union. “War would not only present the most effectual means of destroying it”—the Union—“but would vanish all hope of its peaceable reconstruction.” A system of self-government could not be held together by force; the very use of force contradicted the essence of self-government. “Our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it can not live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish.”

Buchanan was wrong on the last point. Lincoln at inauguration told the secessionist states they would not be allowed to leave without a fight. A month later the Civil War began at Fort Sumter. It ended with the Union re-cemented by the blood of a million of its citizens. 

Yet Buchanan wasn’t wrong about the difficulties of peaceable reconstruction. The war ended in 1865, but reconstruction, which was far from peaceable, wasn’t complete when that project was abandoned in 1877. Almost another century passed before the unfinished business of reconstruction was resumed, and even then it was never entirely completed.