JAMES The 15th President of the United States was a man who held almost every honor which the American people could give him, and yet he retired from public life under a cloud of deserved rebuke, such as has seldom fallen upon a president of our country. He once referred to him self as an " old public functionary"—which was an apt name, for he was in public office almost continuously from the time he was 23 years old until his retirement from the presidency at the age of 70.
Buchanan did not have to fight his way in life by his own efforts, as did Lincoln; nor did he, on the other hand, have such able assistance as did John Quincy Adams. His family belonged to the great middle class of American people. They were Scotch-Irish, who had settled near Mercersburg, Pa., in the latter part of the 18th century. His father was a merchant as well as a farmer, and in these two callings he made enough wealth to maintain his large family in corn fbrt. His son James gives this account of his own education : " After having received a tolerably good English education, I studied the Latin and Greek languages at a school in Mercersburg. I was sent to Dickinson College in the fall of 1807, where I entered the junior class. The college was in a wretched con dition, and I have often regretted that I had not been sent to some other institution." After graduation Buchanan studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1812. Two years later he began his public career as a member of the Pennsylvania state legislature.
Buchanan and the War of 1812 At that time the country was engaged in its second war with England, a war which Buchanan, as a Federalist, had opposed before it was declared, but afterwards urged the people to support. He himself volunteered to help defend Baltimore, but he was never called into active service. That he never ap proved of the war is shown by a speech which he made after peace was declared, in 1815, in which he stated that it had been "glorious in the highest degree to the American character, but disgraceful in the extreme to the administration." Before Buchanan was elected to the legislature, his father was doubtful of the advisability of his entering politics, urging that it was better " to be an eminent lawyer than to be part lawyer and part politician."
Buchanan disregarded this advice, and he soon be came an eminent politician rather than part lawyer and part politician. Besides serving in the state legislature, he was a member of both houses of Con gress, where he was a strong supporter of Jackson; was minister to Russia, in which capacity he negotiated our first commercial treaty with that country; was minister to England; and was secretary of state under Pre-ident Polk. In this last position he had a part in negotiations by which we secured the southern half of the Oregon country, and the vast territory in the :-out liwest from Mexico. He was heartily in favor of the annexation of Texas, and this, together with his share in the Ostend Manifesto, in which he favored the acquisition of Cuba, led to the charge that he was a pro-slavery man.
How He Got to be President Fortunately for his future political career, he was serving as minister to England at the time of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and so was not involved in the quar rels over that bill. This made him an available candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1856. Com bined with his national reputa tion as a statesman, it rendered his election certain over Fre mont, the Free-Soil candidate.
Buchanan was 66 years old at the time of his inaugura tion—the oldest president, ex cept William Henry Harrison, that the country had had. And at this advanced age he was called upon to face some of the most serious problems which have ever confronted a It is no wonder if at his age he attempted, in a feeble way, to avert—instead of meeting—the conflict which threatened the country.
Civil war was already raging in Kansas, where slave-state and free-state men strove to secure pos session of the state government. Buchanan was impressed by the threats of secession uttered by fire eating Southerners, and urged Congress to admit Kansas under the Lecompton constitution, which allowed slavery. He declared that Kansas was as much a slave state as was South Carolina or Georgia; but Congress did not agree with him, and consequent ly Kansas for the time was kept out of the Union.