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James Buchanan

There are several candidates for the title of “most corrupt administration�.

Warren Harding (29th president, 1921-23) played poker late at night with his cabinet officers and other cronies, not realizing that by day they were fleecing himself and the country. He died in his third year in office, just as he was coming to realize what turmoils his administration had wrought.

The political and business scandals of Ulysses S. Grant’s two-term presidency (I told you we’d come back to Grant) induce many historians to call the Grant Administration the worst ever. Grant (18th president, 1868-77) himself was clear of any wrongdoing. But the Victor of the Civil War was so politically naïve, he himself admitted that he was totally unprepared, and unsuited, for the job. Moreover, he was so unskilled and unlucky in the world of commerce, that he would have thought Bloggerparty a good basis for a full-time career. His Civil War fame earned him a fortune – which he invested in a friend’s business deal. The business turned out to be shady, and Grant lost the fortune. It was only his writing of the Personal Memoirs, while he was dying of throat cancer (cigars), and his friendship with Mark Twain, who started a publishing company with the Personal Memoirs as its featured publication and paid Grant an astounding royalty, that got Grant and his family out of criminal debt. Just in time: Grant died two weeks after completing the Personal Memoirs.

(Incidentally, modern scholars consider the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, written by a man who detested both writing and public speaking and did as little of both as possible, and was so ill he almost died before its completion, to be the best military autobiography since the Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar.)

The political and business/financial scandals of James Buchanan (15th president, 1857-61) filled a large volume prepared by Congress near the end of his single term. Most folk do not hear about them, because history has focused on Buchanan’s almost total inability to cope with the fracturing of the Union and the coming of the Civil War instead. However, it is because of the nature of the scandals and his personal involvement in them (unlike Harding and Grant, who were mostly unaware of what was going on), that I place Buchanan nearest to Bush in the funny money derby.

Buchanan was deeply embroiled in improper conduct even before his Presidency officially began, though the depth of his involvement wasn’t clear until recently, when an historian discovered an incriminating letter among Buchanan’s papers. As related in McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, President-Elect Buchanan knew (when he wasn’t supposed to) that the Supreme Court would soon rule on the Dred Scott case – the one where a slave sued for freedom because his master took him into a territory where slavery was prohibited. Famously, the Court not only kept Scott a slave, but ruled that he, as a black man, had no rights under the Constitution, and that the U.S. Government had no right to ban slavery in the territories. Now if all the southern justices had said “yes� to this ruling, but all the northern ones “no�, people might have ignored the ruling because it was “just another North/South thing�. But one northern justice (a Pennsylvanian named Grier) concurred with the majority. And Grier concurred because Buchanan, also a Pennsylanian, told him to.

Buchanan’s Cabinet and other appointments all went to men who essentially agreed with, and were loyal to, Buchanan and his policies, most of which favored the slave-holding South even though he himself was from the North. In other words, Buchanan had an Administration full of cronies, many of whom were, at best, marginally competent (except possibly at corruption). And certainly were all “yes men�. Hmmm …

In fact, one of the few instances in which Buchanan roused himself to action was when a fellow Democrat displayed disloyalty, in this case over the conditions under which the territory of Kansas was to be admitted to the Union as a state. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois challenged Buchanan over the proper course, and was told by Buchanan, in effect, “get back in line or else, Colin�. Douglas (unlike Powell) refused. The resulting split in the Democratic Party allowed the Republicans, who did not even have a ticket in most states south of the Mason-Dixon line, to elect Lincoln President. And that election result touched off the Civil War.

A war won by a President (Lincoln) who appointed talented men rather than cronies to the Cabinet and other offices (Doris K. Goodwin, Team of Rivals), weighed his policies carefully yet executed them forcefully, and who has kept the honorific Honest Abe for more than 150 years.

We will need a Lincoln …

  - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.