James Buchanan: Inaugural Address

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Between 1836 and 1856 Buchanan maintained his position of defending slavery as consistent with his interpretation of the Constitution. He declared that he had no interest in interfering with the institution where it already existed and that the Constitution forbade such interference. He identified his public career (and his prospects for political advancement) with maintaining that position. He refused to debate the merits of slavery as an institution, preferring to view it in constitutional terms; when it came to abolition, however, Buchanan raised again and again the specter of a possible slave insurrection, adding that abolitionists tended to stiffen and intensify southern support for slavery.

Having reassured southern whites of his position, Buchanan offered his views on the expansion of slavery. At first he believed that it would be best to extend the Missouri Compromise line of 36°30′ all the way to the Pacific Ocean to cover the new lands acquired as a result of the Mexican-American War. He argued that in practice this would not result in the expansion of slavery, because he believed that the lands of the Mexican Cession would not prove hospitable to slavery: Between the dry heat and the arid regions, there was little prospect that plantation slavery would prove profitable. That slave labor could be used for other reasons seems not to have occurred to him. In taking this position, however, Buchanan asserted that Congress had the right to determine the fate of slavery in the territories; he hoped it would do so without promoting the agitation of the issue by abolitionists. However, he also believed that the principle of popular sovereignty espoused by Michigan senator Lewis Cass and Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, whereby the settlers of these territories should be left to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery in their territories, promised to perpetuate controversy and competition between pro-slavery and antislavery forces.

Buchanan attributed the controversy over slavery to abolitionist agitation, an assessment that could not but please slave-owning white southerners. He endorsed the Compromise of 1850 as a suitable settlement of the issue of slavery in the territories. However, after failing in his bid to secure the Democratic presidential nomination in 1852, Buchanan left the country the next year as minister to England. While he was overseas he missed the explosion caused by Douglas's 1854 introduction of a bill to organize the territories of Kansas and Nebraska according to the principle of popular sovereignty, although according to the Missouri Compromise, which included Kansas and Nebraska, slavery was previously barred from both territories. That same year, in framing the Ostend Manifesto, which called for the acquisition of Cuba from Spain, Buchanan seemed to be looking toward the Caribbean and Central America as possible future additions to the United States where plantation slavery might well prove profitable.

In 1856 Buchanan returned to the United States and prepared a new presidential bid. This time he was successful. In winning the Democratic nomination, he might have found it ironic that after years of reassuring white southerners of his position on slavery, it was Douglas who claimed a majority of the southern delegates at the convention until he withdrew in favor of Buchanan. In the fall contest he beat out the Republican candidate John C. Frémont and Know-Nothing standard-bearer Millard Fillmore.

As he prepared to become the fifteenth president of the United States, Buchanan hoped for an end to sectional conflict. This conflict had exploded into open bloodshed and violence in Kansas and on the floor of the U.S. Senate, where South Carolina congressman Preston S. Brooks had assaulted Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner with a cane in revenge for the senator's caustic remarks about Brooks's kinsman, South Carolina senator Andrew P. Butler. Looking for an end to such debate, Buchanan learned that the Supreme Court was preparing to rule on the fate of Dred Scott, a slave who was suing for freedom on the ground that he had resided in both a free state (Illinois) and a free territory (Wisconsin, later to become Minnesota). Buchanan urged associate Supreme Court justices John Catron and Robert Grier to ensure that the forthcoming decision could be treated as definitive.

At the time he took the oath of office on March 4, 1857, Buchanan knew that the Supreme Court's decision in Scott's case was imminent, and he believed it would prove decisive. With that in mind he reminds Americans that slavery is protected under the Constitution, adding that the Supreme Court would soon have something to say that would prove to be the last word on the issue of slavery in the territories. At the same time, he outlines his understanding of the situation in Kansas, pledging himself to support the principle of popular sovereignty. With those two issues out of the way, he believes that there would be no need for further agitation of the slavery question: “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.” It is also time to put an end to talk of secession, Buchanan believes, for disunion is an unpleasant prospect that will “involve all in one common ruin.”

Unfortunately for Buchanan, the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, issued just two days after Buchanan took office, not only failed to settle the issue of slavery once and for all but indeed served to make things worse. In denying that Congress could legislate on the issue of slavery in the territories or delegate that authority to the residents of the territory, the Court destroyed the viability of popular sovereignty and declared unconstitutional Republican efforts to contain slavery by prohibiting its expansion. Before long Buchanan made things even worse. He decided to support the efforts of the pro-slavery forces meeting in Lecompton, Kansas, to offer for a vote two different versions of a state constitution, one providing for Kansas to open its doors to the future importation of more slaves, the other restricting slavery to its present strength. The delegates refused to allow for an up-or-down vote on the document as a whole and did not permit voters to bar slavery altogether.

Aware that between Lecompton and the Dred Scott decision his theory of popular sovereignty was in mortal danger, Douglas informed Buchanan that he would have to oppose the proposed constitution. Enraged, Buchanan reminded Douglas of the fate suffered by those Democrats who had once defied Andrew Jackson. Douglas replied by reminding Buchanan that Jackson was dead. The implication was that Buchanan was no Jackson. Although he did what he could to secure the passage of the Lecompton Constitution and the admission of Kansas as a slave state, in the end Buchanan had to admit defeat.