Worst. President. Ever.

Just how bad of a president is James Buchanan? So bad that during his term in office, John F. Kennedy said that only those who had been president--"even poor James Buchanan"-- could understand the pressure the office placed upon its occupants. Even the other presidents use James Buchanan as shorthand for terrible.
So writing a biography of him is an overwhelming task--you have very little in the way of the traditional narrative. Buchanan follows the path of other presidents--he's a representative, then a senator, then a minister, then Secretary of State (in fact, he's the last Secretary of State to become President, unless Hillary has something to say in 2016). But then he becomes President, and he's terrible. Two days after he's inaugurated, the Supreme Court hands down the Dred Scott decision, meaning that the federal government has no authority to limit or abolish slavery in the territories. This means that Buchanan throws his support behind the pro-slavery government of the Kansas Territory (which at the time has two governments battling it out for legitimacy). He's what's called a "doughface," a Northerner (still the only President from Pennsylvania) with Southern sympathies.
He sends troops to Utah to fight the Mormons. He proclaims "reform, not relief" during the financial Panic of 1857. Like Pierce, he's so paralyzed by respect for the law that he fails to protect the Union, which is in full collapse when he leaves office in 1861.

Even in the summer of 2010, when I read Philip S. Klein's James Buchanan: a Biography, the 15th president was still difficult. This was the first book that took me two months to read. And Buchanan threw a wrench into my blogging plans, keeping me from it for over a year; I just didn't want to write about the guy. There's something in that stretch of Fillmore-Pierce-Buchanan that's like 2 PM on a Friday. You know something good is coming, but it's so long until it gets there.

All the action in Buchanan's bio happens when Lincoln's elected. The Union is dissolved, as the famous headline put it. And we know the answer to what happens next, but the process is well worth watching. Lincoln's Buchanan's opposite in many ways, but most decisively is his willingness to act.

Mr. Double Hockey Sticks

There are always attempts to rank the presidents, according to any number of criteria: effectiveness, legacy, corruptness, efficiency. And while every historian brings his or her own set of biases to the table, and public opinion polls reveal more about the present than they do history (I recall one a few years ago that had both Clinton and Bush II in the top ten, an indicator of partisan battle if ever one existed), surely we can all agree on one thing:

The next three presidents were awful.

To this point, I'd managed to find copies of each biography in my public library. Since I'd relied on them for the Madison and Monroe biographies (and been unimpressed by them), I've tried to steer away from the Schlesinger series. Up until Taylor, that hadn't been a problem. But Millard Fillmore? Apart from the Schlesinger, the only other biography of the 13th President was a half-joking one.

So it was off to the university's library to find a suitable book, which turned out to be Robert Rayback's Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President, published in 1959. Is it a good biography of Fillmore? I suppose so. I finished it with a pretty decent idea of who Fillmore was, why he acted the way he did, and what effect the New York political system had on both the Democrats and Whigs. But is it a good biography, compulsively readable in the way that John Adams was? No. And yet, it was to be the best presidential biography I would read in the next three months.

Here's the problem with Presidents 13-15: they're so dedicated to keeping the Union together that they do anything it takes to appease everyone. They're called 'doughfaces," because they change their countenances to suit everyone. They hold back the dam of the Union, trying to avoid a flood of secession from bursting out; when it does, ten years after Fillmore takes office, he and his successors are swept away in it.


As a result, the histories of this time are one of compromises, and it's Fillmore who's in office when the 1850 Compromise is made into law. In fact, it's Fillmore's presidency that makes the 1850 Compromise easier to pass, as the slave-holding Taylor was, oddly, against extending slavery into the southwest. Fillmore, however, has no compunctions against appeasing the South by extending slavery.

Five things happen in the Compromise of 1850:

1. California joins the Union as a free state.
2. The slave trade (but not slavery) is abolished in the District of Columbia.
3. Utah and New Mexico Territories are organized under the rule of popular sovereignty, meaning that they'd get to decide about slavery themselves.
4. Texas gives up its claim to some western lands in exchange for $10,000,000 with which to pay off its national debt, accrued while it was an independent nation.
5. The Fugitive Slave Act is passed.

If you know about the Compromise of 1850, it's probably this last part, which polarizes the nation further, and ties James Buchanan's hands when the South secedes in 1860. If you're pro-Fillmore, you argue that he managed to stave off war for ten more years. If you're anti-Fillmore, you argue that he didn't do anything but manage to stave off war for another ten years. It's a rough time to be president.

So rough, in fact, that in 1852, Fillmore can't even get nominated for a second term as president--northern Whigs block him for signing the Fugitive Slave Act and Winfield Scott runs instead. But like Martin van Buren, Fillmore takes one more shot at being president; in 1856, he runs on the Know-Nothing ticket as the candidate of a nativist party that's staunchly against the influx of immigrants, mostly Irish and German, who are coming into the country. He loses.

I have no idea why you'd ever talk about Fillmore at a party, but here's something:

"Millard Fillmore? Well, he's the only president who has double consonants in both his first and last name. Beyond that, he serves as a good warning for parties that campaign on fear, as Fillmore did, warning the populace against Irish immigrants who would take their orders from Rome instead of DC. You can't just be against something--you have to do something, too."