Will President Trump go down as the worst president in history?
That question is being asked a lot, by scholars and columnists, and the result is a new spotlight on our 15th president, James Buchanan, who has locked down that spot for most of the past 159 years, since he slinked out of town on the eve of the Civil War.
Why is Buchanan always so near the bottom? How, exactly, did he screw up? The lists don’t usually go into much detail, except for a few vague sentences about how he failed to avert the war. But that passive formulation doesn’t really get at his spectacular awfulness. Repeatedly, he made terrible decisions, and when presented with various options, pursued the most extreme pro-slavery position (despite the fact that he came from Pennsylvania). He chose a Cabinet dominated by corrupt slave owners who lined their own pockets and stole government assets. When crises came, he had no answers, because he didn’t think the federal government should intervene. As more people questioned his choices, he angrily dismissed their criticism. All of these deficits have kept him permanently at or near the bottom of presidential rankings.
Over the course of his career, Buchanan had grown comfortable with small moral surrenders. A New York diarist, George Templeton Strong, called him an “old mollusk,” as if he were not quite in the vertebrate class. Other nicknames were not much better: to John Quincy Adams, he was “the sneaking scrivener”; to James K. Polk, “an old maid.” Early in his career, he flip-flopped from the fading Federalists to the Democrats, who were rising behind Andrew Jackson. For a time, the Democrats became a meaningfully national party, with a big tent that included many Northerners, and some Southerners who did not love slavery.
But greed and paranoia began to change Democrats in the 1850s, and Southern bosses began to practice an angrier politics, flaunting their wealth, calling for new slave states in Cuba and northern Mexico and arguing that slavery was good for America. Buchanan was happy to acquiesce, and was prominently involved with efforts to bring in Cuba, by force if necessary. For his loyalty, he succeeded in winning the nomination in 1856.
He won the election easily, despite a rising threat from a new party, the Republicans, who were organizing to resist the growing stranglehold of slavery. But his inaugural festivities seemed to suggest that a storm was coming. The day began “genial and bright,” according to the New York Times, until the exact moment of the inaugural, when “clouds portentously lowered over the head of the new president and the assembled thousands.” That dark moment is captured in the earliest photo of an inaugural. Buchanan was also fighting dysentery after eating a bad meal in one of the city’s hotels.
It was the beginning of a long run of bad luck that always seemed to find Buchanan on the wrong side of history.