James “I Didn’t Start the Fire” Buchanan

Posted on December 18, 2025 by smellincoffee

What do I know about Mr. James Buchanan? Well, he’s our only bachelor president, leaning on his niece to be his hostess at White House functions; he was very chummy with the founder of my hometown, William Rufus King, and supposedly when the South seceded he simply shrugged and said “Yeah, that’s an 1861 problem, not an 1860 problem.” Jean H. Baker argues that Buchanan was by no means passive; he was, in fact, quite an activist — but he acted in favor of his friends, with extreme partiality towards the South, and was so confident in his abilities and self-absorbed in his own desires that he treated his responsibilities toward the country rather shabbily.

There were few men more qualified to serve as president than James Buchanan, Jean Baker declares by way of opening. He had served ably in both houses of Congress for decades and been nominated to the Supreme Court more than once. (He kept withdrawing his name for consideration, desirous of the ultimate prize — the presidency.) And yet his administration is universally regarded as the worst in American history, ending with seven states having seceded from the Union and numerous others on the fence about it. Excoriated in his own lifetime, Buchanan protested that he did take action — he ordered one of the two forts that hadn’t surrendered, Fort Sumter, to be resupplied. So there! And he even made a speech that secession is something we mustn’t do, though — dear me, dear me — there’s nothing to be done about it if you were to happen to secede. Nothing in the Constitution, you see? Never mind that Buchanan had gotten aggressive domestically before, in Kansas — though Baker oddly ignores his actions in Panama, another testament to the fact that Jimmy was no shrinking violet.

Baker attributes Buchanan’s inconsistent actions in office to two things: one, he inculcated the formal, procedural nature of the law into his personality. He was not dynamic, able to roll with the changes, and once he’d rendered a judgment or settled on an opinion there was no changing it. He expected that, the law having been issued, it was The Law. If you wanted to change it, there were ways to do that, but they didn’t involve ignoring the law or subverting it. The Lecompton Constitution, for instance, was a travesty, a mean joke — drawn up by an extreme minority of Kansans and sent to Congress to debate. It was, frankly, unconstitutional, containing measures to persecute the free speech of those who opposed slavery — but Buchanan accepted and endorsed it because the Lecompton legislature which had drawn it up was the officially recognized legislature of Kansas, not the freesoiler one in Topeka.

More importantly, however, was Buchanan’s deep investment in Southern social society. Although he’d been raised with a story that Abe Lincoln would appreciate — born to a poor family that turned hard work into success and thriving businesses — Buchanan was no hardscrabble Yankee. He studied law and was deeply appreciative of his southern friends’ more laid-back approach to life. They too, studied law and practiced it and politics, but they were more men of leisure and arts rather than bank books and real estate speculation. Baker writes that Buchanan found their company deeply attractive — far more so than pushy Puritans. He surrounded himself in the White House by men of the South, and his cabinet remained mostly southern even after South Carolina had seceded and men in other states were actively preparing for their self-defense in case Lincoln decided to take the Andrew Jackson approach to secession.

I half-expected when I began this book to end it viewing Buchanan more sympathetically, as happened with my reading of Franklin Pierce. That was not the case, though it’s not necessarily Baker’s fault even though she was clearly not a fan. There was some bleedover from my reading 1858 at the same time and seeing Buchanan’s obsession with Cuba and pushing around Paraguay, and then seeing him here trying to will the slavery issue away — adding fuel to the fire through such aggressive support, feeding more aggression from abolitionists — he strikes me as a man with the wrong priorities. Being a southerner, I suppose I should like him for his partiality towards the South, but his indulging the plantation elite proved not only immoral, but not in the South’s best interests. It probably would have been best for everyone if Buchanan had accepted earlier offers to join the Supreme Court.

Although Baker is definitely not an impartial biographer, I enjoyed learning about Buchanan’s early life, and this combined with the other two works I was reading gave me a better appreciation of how a duck he truly was. Of the three, this is the best for a survey of his life and work, since 1858 and Bosom Friends are more focused in scope. Given that Bosom Friends focuses on Buchanan’s social life, particularly the “Bachelor’s Mess” he kept with William Rufus King and several other legislators, I’m hoping to end this miniseries within my larger “impending crisis” obsession on a slightly more charitable note. ‘Tis the season.

Quotations

As a loyal member of the Democratic party Buchanan represented one of the few remaining national institutions in the United States when he was elected president. By that time, churches had separated into northern and southern factions; newspapers printed only sectional versions of the events of the day and the new Republican party had no following south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Only the Democracy remained the voice of all the people —North and South.

Buchanan had long since chosen sides. Both physically and politically he had only one farsighted eye, and it looked southward.

Republicans and many northern Democrats considered the invasion of Mexico gross interference in the domestic affairs of another nation. Besides it was illegal to use American troops to invade another nation without a declaration of war by Congress. But the president held Mexico an exception to such constitutional strictures. It was a neighbor whose “anarchy and confusion” affected Americans. “As a good neighbor shall we not extend to her a helping hand to save her?”

Measured against other presidents, even those in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Buchanan is one of the most aggressive, hawkish chief executives in American history.

Americans have conveniently misled themselves about the presidency of James Buchanan, preferring to classify him as indecisive and inactive. According to historian Samuel Eliot Morison, “He prayed, and frittered and did nothing.” In fact, Buchanan’s failing during the crisis over the Union was not inactivity, but rather his partiality for the South, a favoritism that bordered on disloyalty in an officer pledged to defend all the United States. He was that most dangerous of chief executives, a stubborn, mistaken ideologue whose principles held no room for compromise. His experience in government had only rendered him too self-confident to consider other views. In his betrayal of the national trust, Buchanan came closer to committing treason than any other president in American history.

Throughout the war Buchanan was a good Unionist. He supported the draft, but not the Emancipation Proclamation, and he never publicly criticized what he considered Lincoln’ violations of the Constitution.



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1858

Posted on December 17, 2025 by smellincoffee

1858 is a history of the second year of James Buchanan’s administration, a year notable less for what Buchanan did than for what he refused to do while the slavery debate burned white-hot. He maintained that slavery was no longer a live issue, having been “settled” by the Dred Scott decision, which declared that neither territorial governments nor Congress could restrict slavery in the West. Married to that conviction, Buchanan turned his attention instead to pining after Cuba, chest-thumping in Paraguay, and quarreling with—and often actively undermining—his own party. Although this book sometimes felt scattered, it has some very strong sections and was wholly diverting even when it appeared off-topic.

Before reading this book, I had assumed Buchanan largely earned his terrible reputation through his paralysis after secession; Chadwick makes clear that this was only one entry in a much longer portfolio of failure. Despite his extensive legislative experience, Buchanan appears to have had little talent for managing people, and by the midterms he had alienated many of those around him. His astonishing December declaration that slavery was no longer a contentious issue only underscores how detached he was from political reality. Buchanan is not the book’s sole focus, however. The rise of Abraham Lincoln receives sustained attention, particularly through the Lincoln–Douglas debates, where Lincoln’s name and political philosophy were established on a national stage. Other pivotal figures appear as well—Lee, Jefferson Davis, William Sherman—but their role in the year’s story feels largely incidental, if often fun in themselves (who would expect the savage Sherman to be an enthusiastic sketcher of birds?).

Although Buchanan claimed to stand on Jeffersonian principles, using them to justify his passivity during the secession crisis, Chadwick argues persuasively that Buchanan was perfectly willing to intervene when it suited him. His response to Paraguay—dispatching a nineteen-ship fleet to demand compensation after an American vessel was fired upon for allegedly trespassing on the Paraná River—was anything but restrained. While Buchanan may have hoped to focus on foreign policy, particularly on acquiring Cuba, the book reveals just how close the country was drifting toward catastrophe and how foolish the president was to turn a blind eye. (Literally, in Buchanan’s case — he had terrible eye trouble.) Kansas was the key: after years of bloody fighting between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions, the pro-slavery faction attempted to impose a state constitution so radically pro-slavery that even criticizing the institution was a crime. It was so extreme, in fact, that Buchanan’s own pro-slavery territorial governor resigned in protest—and despite Buchanan’s endorsement, the proposed constitution was ultimately rejected by both Congress and the people of Kansas.

This was an eye-opening reading. While the main goal for me was to learn more about Buchanan, I enjoyed meeting the other historical figures and seeing their human side — Sherman’s art, Lee’s desire to leave the Army to tend to his wife’s health, etc — and learning about the Lincoln-Douglas debates and the scope of Buchanan’s failures was tremendously educational. Buchanan’s effective sabotage of his own party was among the most striking revelations of the book. He was not merely ineffective, but actively corrosive, alienating allies, enforcing ideological loyalty, and expending political capital on foreign fixations while the country steamed toward crisis. What continues to baffle me is why a Pennsylvanian with no economic ties to slavery was, throughout his career, one of the vile institution’s most reliable defenders — but that may be the subject of another book. Buchnanan appears to be a man so obsessed with scoring foreign policy wins, especially expanding DC’s influence into Latin America, that he was willing to sweep the obvious domestic crisis under a rug and declare he’d made a clean sweep of it. Can you imagine a president ignoring fundamental domestic issues, alienating allies, and being obsessed with expanding American power in Latin America today?

Coming up next: um, more Buchanan. I’m nearly done with a formal biography of Buchanan (my WWW made me a liar, I assumed I’d be done when I scheduled it a few days ago), and I’m plowing through a joint biography of Buchanan and William Rufus King in a book that examines the role of Congressional “messes” — boardinghouse arrangments that had solons living together in the early days of Washington — had on legislation and alliances.

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WWW Wednesday

Posted on December 17, 2025 by smellincoffee

WHAT have you finished reading recently? James Buchanan, Jean H. Baker.

WHAT are you reading now? Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and Willliam Rufus King, Thomas Balcerski, and 1858 by Bruce Chadwick

WHAT are you reading next? Probably one of my Stephen Douglas-related histories.

Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy, Michael Woods

Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War, Douglas Egerton

Chorus of the Union: How Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas Set Aside Their Rivalry to Save the Nation, Edward McClelland.

Yes, I am in a strange reading frenzy at the moment, solidly locked in to the two decades preceding the Civil War. On the bright side, it’s corrected that appalling lead fiction gained over nonfiction back when CJ Box hijacked my reading year.

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The Expatriation of Franklin Pierce

Posted on December 16, 2025 by smellincoffee
“Some men are so constituted that they do not incline to bow before a storm.”

Continuing in the tragedy of Franklin Pierce, I chose to follow a short biography of him with this, a more focused look Pierce’s exit from the presidency, when he found himself wholly isolated. Four years ago, he had earned a record for most electoral votes gathered in any preceding election: he left office as the ‘leader’ of a party so split over slavery that it was soon to be ruined, hated by many. When the Civil War began, he was agonized: a lover of the Union, he nontheless believed the Republicans firmly in the wrong. Their continual attacks on Southern institutions that could not easily change, institutions that the South’s leading men were deeply invested in, had accelerate this crisis. He was also intimate friends with Jefferson and Varina Davis, and despite his preference for the Union could not in good conscience declare Davis a traitor the way so many who did not know the man did. A sympathetic letter to Davis would be intercepted and widely published in the North so that those who feast upon ‘the news’ and wax in self-righteous vitriol could declare him a traitor.

During the war, Pierce’s wife would die, as would one of his best friends Nathaniel Hawthorne — but such was the contempt northerners now held Pierce in that he was not even allowed to be a pallbearer at the funeral, relegated instead to sit and observe. As the war progressed, he would do more than sit: he would begin speaking out against Lincoln’s abuses of civil liberties, almost embracing the scorn levied on him by the war’s more ardent supporters. He did this at no small risk to himself, at a time when other men were being exiled or indeed even hung for the same ‘crime’. He had become a man without a country, loyal to a Union that had now transformed itself into something he no longer recognized. He was almost nearly friendless, too, removed from the Davises by the exigencies of war and then later prison. After the war, he would discreetly labor in behalf of Davis’ release from prison: fortunately for the former Southern president, the North had engaged in such an orgy of hangings after the murder of Lincoln that their appetite for blood was satiated and no one quite knew what to do with their stoic Mississippi prisoner. Tellingly, the Union government never formally tried Davis for treason, for fear that the case for secession might fare better in the courts of law than on the battlefield.

This was a winsome little book, giving Franklin Pierce a proper stage as a tragic figure. How complex a character he was, and his times — to stand for the principles of the Union, and in so doing, be accused of being a traitor to the Union. Pierce has proven quite the surprise; while he was perhaps not the man the hour demanded, in these biographies I have found him a man of conscience and compassion, dedicated to his friends and his principles and cheerfully willing to suffer slander in their cause. If I ever find myself up in New Hampshire I may have to pay my respects.

Quotations

Just weeks before the end of his term, upon learning that Varina Davis was ill and by herself with her new-born son at the Davis apartment on 14 and F streets, Pierce headed out by himself into a January blizzard with snow gusts waist-high to check on her. When a grateful Varina later asked why he had not simply sent a White House servant or two, Pierce remarked that “they would have no personal interest to urge them on.”

“I have no prejudice against the Southern people,” Lincoln declared, in one of his many nicely-composed phrases. “They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up.”

Alexander H. Stephens, foreseeing what he thought would by the cataclysmic results of a Lincoln victory [in May 1860], was much more certain: “In less than twelve months we shall be in the midst of a bloody war. What is to become of us then God only knows.”

Lincoln’s usurpation of power that was clearly not delegated to him by the constitution would have many ramifications: throughout the summer and fall of 1861 thousands of citizens, some guilty of nothing more than criticizing the president, were rounded up and thrown behind bars, usually charged with treason or sedition. They were writers, political activists, judges, and lawmakers.But in many other cases they were nothing more than simple American citizens.

In Washington, Chandler was regarded as something of a comical figure largely because everything he did had come to seem so predictable. This made him good for jokes that he did not appreciate. When Chandler dramatically declared he would join the Comanche Nation if the North permitted the South to secede, Texas Senator Louis T. Wigfall, unable to resist, responded “God forbid! I hope not. They [the Comanches] have already suffered much from their contact with the whites.” Everyone but Chandler laughed in response.

Yet despite his alarm over the course the country was taking under Lincoln, Pierce could never wean himself of a love for the United States itself. Polishing off a bottle of rum with Nathaniel Hawthorne in late January, Pierce remained convinced that the American experiment could still work: “He is bigoted to the Union,” Hawthorne said of Pierce, “and sees nothing but ruin without it.”

.
“I don’t quite understand what we are fighting for, or what definite result can be expected,” the author had confided to Horatio Bridge in May of 1861 as the towns of his native New England were awash in red, white, and blue bunting and endless military parades. “If we pummel the South ever so hard, they will love us none the better for it,” Hawthorne continued, before revealing that—unlike Pierce—he wasn’t all that excited about maintaining the Union in the first place. “And even if we subjugate
them [the South], our next stop should be to cut them adrift.”

There could be no denying that Davis was deficient in political skills. Varina perhaps summed up the problem best when she said her husband “did not know the arts of the politician and would not practice them if understood.” Yet it was also true that Davis faced an almost impossible task as the commander in chief of a nation that had not even existed the month before he became president. Suddenly he was the head of a national government that had no existing or functioning bureaucracy, institutional memory, or executive precedents. And just to make his burden even more absurd, it was a government that was also at war with a far more powerful, rich, and populous opponent capable of recruiting more soldiers, producing far larger amounts of war materiel, and getting it to the front lines more efficiently on a vast network of rail lines.

In Lincoln’s wake something dark and forbidding swept over the country. At Fort Jefferson, Florida, soldiers turned on one of their own who said he was glad Lincoln had been shot and hung him. “I honestly confess that I have very little sympathy for him or any man who is not punished for similar expressions,” a fellow soldier remarked. Enraged crowds seeking to avenge the president’s murder ransacked the offices of the San Francisco Union and San Francisco American, both of which papers had been generally anti-administration. In Maryland, the editor of the Westminster Democrat was killed for unwisely running a column critical of the deceased president.

And now he stood on a wet night before a mob composed of boys old enough to know anger, but too young to understand much of anything else, and had to defend who he was.

But if critics thought Holt was too severe and unbending, it didn’t really matter. He only had to please one person, and that person was the president. And Lincoln was very happy with him, particularly after suspending the writ of habeas corpus and giving to Holt the responsibility—for the first time in U.S. history—of conducting military trials for civilian political prisoners. It was in this capacity that Holt oversaw the treason conviction of Pierce ally Clement Vallandigham as well as Indiana peace activist Lambdin P. Mulligan, who was sentenced to death; convictions that Lincoln himself reviewed and signed off on.

Then he added a sentence that could have, in the end, served as an epitaph for his entire career, but most certainly for his years as a lone voice of dissent in Lincoln’s America: “Some men are so constituted,” Pierce said, “that they do not incline to bow before a storm.”

“I can appreciate his ability, integrity and agreeable social qualities,” Sherman finally concluded of a man he rarely socialized with in the 1850s, adding: “and only regret that he was President of the United States at a time when the sagacity of a Jefferson, the determined courage of a Jackson, or the shrewdness and wisdom of a Lincoln were needed to meet the difficulties and dangers which he had to encounter.”

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Top Ten Books On my “Winter” TBR

Posted on December 16, 2025 by smellincoffee

Today’s treble-T is books we think we will be reading this winter. As I did in summer and fall, I want to first look back at the prior quarter’s TBR predictions and see how I did. I did….poorly. Of the ten books I listed, I read exactly one, Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth. That does not give me great confidence in the next list I post, so I am going to lean into my current strange reading mood — the history of the sectional division that led to the Civil War, very Christmassey — and post ten titles that are on my immediate-interest list in that vein. I am afraid things look poor indeed for the science survey. But first, a tease!

Buchanan heatedly reminded Douglas that he would suffer harsh consequences if he broke with the administration on Kansas. He reportedly told him of two Democratic senators who had opposed Andrew Jackson twenty years earlier. “Mr. Douglas, I desire you to remember that no Democrat has ever yet differed from the administration of his own choice without being crushed. Remember the fate of Tallmadge and Rives.”
Douglas looked back at him and said chillingly, “I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead, sir.” 1858, Bruce Chadwick

seriously, this is my browsing history at amazon at the moment. A science book, two gag gifts, and then 1830s-1860s American history.

Ten TBR Titles If My Current Mood Persists

(1) 1858: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and the War They Failed to See, Bruce Chadwick.

(2) James Buchanan, Jean H. Baker.

(3) Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy, Michael Woods

(4) Lincoln and the Decision for War, Russell McClintock. Covers the ‘secession winter’ of 1860-1861 and the outbreak of hostilities in April ’61.

(5) Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era, Nicole Etscheson. And by “contested liberty”, we mean “two different state governments and lots of murder between people fighting over slavery

(6) Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War, Douglas Egerton

(7) Lincoln vs Davis: War of the Presidents, Nigel Hamilton. Looks at how each executive performs, I think.

(8) Chorus of the Union: How Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas Set Aside Their Rivalry to Save the Nation, Edward McClelland.

(9) Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee, Michael Korda

(10) And Then There Was Light: Lincoln and the American Struggle, Jon Meacham

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From Hero to Zero: Franklin Pierce

Posted on December 13, 2025 by smellincoffee

Franklin Pierce wasn’t high on my interest list of presidents to read about for this America @ 250 project until I learned that he was intimate friends with Jefferson Davis and his wife Varina. Pierce and Davis served together in the Army, then in high office, and shared the awful burden of having lost children. In Pierce’s case, he lost three, and then he effectively lost his country: because he would not denounce his friend Jeff Davis during the War, he himself was treated as a pariah and spent his last years a recluse, abused socially whenever he ventured out. I found this premise completely captivating, almost like a tragic novel, and wanted to learn more about the man. Franklin Pierce by Michael F. Holt offers a little insight, but it is not for the faint of heart, digging deeply into party politics. That is not an accident, because Pierce’s compromises to keep the Democratic party intact would backfire mightily, leading to a split ticket that allowed for the triumph of the Republicans at the polls — and the death of the early Republic as it splintered into civil war and emerged a new, bloody creature. If, however, your interest is in the crackup of the Democratic party and the road to Civil War, this will prove a short but detailed read.

There are surely fewer figures in American history who have experienced the kind of rise and fall exhibited by Franklin Pierce. The son of a prominent figure, young Frank rose swiftly in New Hampshire politics within a new and cohesive Democratic party: he was ensconced within the state legislature in his twenties, and continued to rise through the ranks, stopping only to fight in the Mexican war where he did not especially distinguish himself, being roughly treated by his own horse. While he earned no soldiers’ kudos, he was seen as a safe bet in the Democratic party of the late ’40s and early ’50s — everyone liked Frank. He looked dashing, he was hard working and well spoken, and despite being almost as far North as you can get, he had a steady affection for the South and a good base of support there. What could go wrong?

Well…Kansas. And Nebraska. The Kansas-Nebraska act, to be specific. The question of slavery had plagued the American union from its birth: the Founding generation resolved to table it for a few decades, knowing they needed to come together to throw off the yoke of Parliament and its taxes, but bad policies do not improve with age any more than bad news does. The Founding generation had the luxury of believing slavery was dying out on its own: they did not anticipate that the cotton gin would give it new life, nor that succeeding generations of Southerners, constantly attacked for how prominent slavery was within their society, would make its defense an article of faith rather than a necessary evil. As the borders of the Union continued to drift further west — hastened by purchases of land and that little Mexican dustup — sectional strife increased. Southerners were adamant that the possibility of slavery exist out west, even if the land was too barren to permit heavy agriculture, or if the locals — in the case of the upper west — didn’t want to allow blacks at all. Some peace was achieved by the Missouri compromise, but then the Kansas-Nebraska act stirred the kettle all over again by insisting that whether states be slave or free depended entirely on the people who lived there. While this sounded ‘democratic’, it was a compromise in the truest sense: it forced everyone to live by lies, to an extent. There was no sense at all in a man’s state in life depending on where he happened to live: if a man was a man and not some ‘pygmy’ as the most ardent slavers held, that could not possibly vary on invisible lines drawn on a map. Pierce, however, insisted in good limited-government fashion that it made perfect sense for the people of each State to decide on this matter, and he shifted his appointments within the spoils system to force recalcitrant Democrats on either side to step in line. While they did at first, they did not do so for long — and the result was an implosion for the Democratic party, one that was delayed enough to allow for the election of President Buchanan but then happened with such thoroughness that Democrats did not achieve the high office again until Grover Cleveland two decades later. With Kansas dissolving into a miniature civil war — complete with rival legislatures and John Brown murdering people simply for acknowledging one or the other — Pierce’s lack of active leadership, his retiring in the field of combat, led to punishing results at the polls.

This was…a difficult book to summarize. I was interested in Pierce’s role in the road to secession, of course, and that I got in spades — but little else. Pierce’s intimate relationship with the Davises is never mentioned at all: instead, we get a notion of a man who let the perfect become the enemy of the good, and made wide the road to secession and war by maintaining that it was not his place to interfere. Perhaps it was not, from his view of someone who had a constrained vision of the executive we lost only when Lincoln and others turned the presidency into an elective monarchy. Still, with the hindsight of history it is hard to wish he and his successor Buchanan did not do more. I will read more of Mr. Pierce, either directly (The Expatriation of Franklin Pierce) or through his presence in other volumes. And I suspect I will read more of Mr. Holt, given that he has an entire book on the rise and fall of the Whigs.

Quotations

A crucial facet of nineteenth-century political life can help the modern reader understand how this could happen. After all, today’s major parties, the Democrats and Republicans, appear almost invulnerable to challenges from new parties. But that invulnerability is largely attributable to the fact that state governments print the ballots voters cast, punch, or mark, and the same governments control the access that parties have to those publicly printed ballots. Thus challengers to the major parties must jump through hoops, usually by collecting signatures on petitions, to get on the ballot so that people might have a chance to vote for them. In the nineteenth century, however, governments did not print and distribute ballots. That was the job of the political parties themselves. In effect, this system meant that all that was needed to launch a new party was access to printing presses and enough volunteer manpower to distribute its ballots at the polls. That was the scenario in the extraordinarily tumultuous elections of 1854—55 in which the northern electorate repudiated Pierce’s party.

The Barnburners, who had supported Van Buren’s candidacy in 1848 and who constituted a clear majority of the party, were now led by John A. Dix. The Soft-Shell Hunkers, who had supported Cass in 1848 and had welcomed the Barnburners back to the Democratic fold in 1849, were led by William L. Marcy, whom Pierce had named to the top post in his cabinet. Finally, the Hard-Shell Hunkers were led by former senator Daniel S. Dickinson and insisted that Barnburner rebels be denied any elective or appointive office. “

After denouncing slavery as “a relic of barbarism,” calling for renewed defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act, and insisting that Congress prohibit slavery extension to check the “unequal representation” of the South in Washington, D.C., [the nascent Republican Party] declared that the purpose of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was to “give the Slave States such a decided and practical preponderance in all measures of government as shall reduce the North . . . to the mere province of a few slaveholding oligarchs of the South—to a condition too shameful to be contemplated.” The party’s platform concluded: “That in view of the necessity of battling for the first principles of republican government, and against the schemes of aristocracy the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed, or man debased, we will co-operate and be known as Republicans until the contest be terminated.” In short, the mission of the Republican Party was less opposition to slavery than opposition to southern slaveholders, and this would be the primary theme of Republican campaigners until the Civil War.

No blood had been shed during the Sack of Lawrence, but a few nights later, apparently in retaliation for this raid, the anti-slavery fanatic John Brown and his sons butchered five innocent settlers along Pottawatomie Creek in Franklin County, Kansas. Not one of the victims owned slaves; their offense was that they paid fealty to the official territorial legislature..

What pushed Pierce over the edge was the arrest and prosecution by military tribunal in the spring of 1863 of the Ohio Peace Democrat Clement L. Vallandigham for calling the war a failure—an arrest and prosecution that Lincoln defended. For Pierce, this violation of fundamental civil liberty was too much; hence he agreed to be the keynote speaker at a mass Democratic rally in Concord, New Hampshire, on July 4, 1863. Addressing some twenty-five thousand people, Pierce issued a passionate defense of the right of free speech. “Who,” he asked, “has clothed the President with power to dictate to any of us when we may or must speak, or be silent, and especially in relation to the conduct of any public servant? By what right does he presume to prescribe a formula of language for your lips or mine?” Then Pierce took a step too far. Like Vallandigham, he described the Union’s war effort as “fearful, fruitless, [and] fateful.” A reliance on armed force, he averred, could never produce peace.

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Martin Van Buren

Posted on December 12, 2025 by smellincoffee

Who is Martin Van Buren? When I cast the name into the pool of my imagination, I can see his face reflected there, framed by wild sideburns and seeded by a guide to the US Presidents I read cover to cover obsessively in middle school. (It covered everyone from George W to George W.) The trivia factoid assigned to him in the book was that he was the first US President to not be a subject of Parliament when he was born, though frankly knowing he didn’t speak English when he was young would’ve been more interesting. I picked this book up as part of an old-but-rarely-pursued course of presidential biographies that I’ve gotten more interested in continuing as America’s 250th looms. Ted Widmer’s Martin Van Buren is a short and often punchy biography of this singular figure in American life, a man frequently forgot despite having a large ‘quiet’ role in how American politics developed in the early 19th century.

Van Buren, it seems, was instrumental to the creation of the Democratic party, which he forged in an effort to reconcile the interests of New York and Virginia. He had a knack for party organization, in fact, building a machine in New York before he ascended to the national stage. He came of age when the balance of economic and political power was slowly starting to shift from the South to the North, and would ride that transition — ultimately helping create the Free Soil party, precursor to the Republican party that later Democrats raised quite a fuss about in 1860. The book largely focuses on Van Buren’s political career, so that it’s hard to get a sense of the person underneath the president. At first I thought this was a fixation of the author, but after doing more background reading it appears to be a consequence of the man himself. He was widowed early and focused obsessively on his work: his ‘leisure’ activities of reading, socializing, and travel were all fastened to politics as surely as a bridle to a horse. He appears to have met luminaries of different ages — visiting with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in their declining years, serving under Jackson’s tutelage, and still later enjoying an evening with a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, quite by accident. (During a grand tour of the country, Van Buren was forced to hole up for the evening in a little inn in Rochester: the proprietor was so eager to amuse his unexpected guest that he sent for a storyteller and raconteur he knew had an interest in politics.)

This was an interesting little read. The writing is very accessible and sometimes drift toward being overly casual to me, but it’s often funny despite the fact that the main attraction is a man not known for great policy decisions but instead the quiet under-the-table work that makes modern politics function. While Van Buren still feels like a bit of a cipher, considering that he rarely wrote about himself in his own journals, it’s possible that no one but his late wife knew him beyond the civil but savvy political creature he was.

And on a completely unrelated note, nonfiction has FINALLY CAUGHT UP from the three months of CJ Box. Also, my next obscure president will probably be Franklin Pierce.

Quotations

In the long annals of the presidency, it would be difficult to find a presidential spouse we know less about than Hannah Van Buren. There are no likenesses of her, and she died long before Van Buren was elected. She is not mentioned in the enormous manuscript of his autobiography. Yet there is not the slightest whiff of scandal about their love, and it is telling that he never remarried after her death in 1819.

We have lost the sense of what the law once stood for to ambitious young men. As the nineteenth century dawned, it still commanded an awe that transcended the political realm. Lawyers were the priests of a secular order. Their learning was majestic: their Latinate vocabularies, their parchments, their stately mien, their effortless command of the Common Law, the repository of Anglo-Saxon cultural habits dating back half a millennium. The United States may have been writing a new chapter in human history, but its lawyers, the people who really ran things, were part of an ancient guild connecting them to the Middle Ages. Tocqueville wrote, with understatement, “The government of democracy is favorable to the political power of lawyers.”

Just as Lincoln would do in Illinois, he traveled the circuit, talking about people and politics everywhere he went. One source claims that he was developing a useful skill for a politician—the ability to walk into a tavern and hold an enormous amount of alcohol without any sign of impairment.

In 1842, Jabez Hammond published The History of Political Parties in the State of New York, in three octavo volumes. If you can even find it in a library, there is a good chance that you will be the first person to have taken it out in a century and a half. Yet beneath its ancient leather binding, the brittle pages teem with life.

But as usual, many of Van Buren’s best moves took place far from the public eye. Like a nineteenth-century Vito Corleone, he was always thinking ahead of his enemies, forging a new network of families and alliances that would forever redraw the map of power in the United States. Everything he did contributed to the goal of unfurling a new national party, nominally Jeffersonian but now hitched to the rising star of Andrew
Jackson.

None of this activity was lost on President [John Quincy] Adams, who could not have looked upon Van Buren’s activity with more disfavor if he was an emissary from the Vatican seeking to convert Yankee maids to Papism and then sell them into white slavery. In one of his most vituperative journal entries, he managed to disembowel Van Buren for reasons ranging from his parentage to his politics to Aaron Burr’s treason (the Adamses were nothing if not efficient—why write only one insult when three would get you so muchmore for your ink expenditure?).

Since Dolley Madison’s benign rule over Washington in the teens, a formidable force had been gathering strength in the capital—the influence of political wives. Nearly as soon as the British retreated, they advanced, and in the 1820s, as Washington became less an architectural sketch and more a genuine community, it was inevitable that these powerful spouses would feel their growing power over the destinies of the young republic. And they would advance their power through what passed for weapons of mass destruction at the time: gossip, innuendo, and outright slander.

Even later that spring, when he might have recanted, he refused, saying he would not trim “his sails to catch the passing breeze.” This was Van Buren at his best.

It would take a long time before the wounds of the 1844 convention were healed. Thomas Hart Benton, Van Buren’s friend from Missouri, saw a dark design behind the scenes in Baltimore: “Disunion is at the bottom of this long-concealed Texas machination. Intrigue and speculation cooperate; but disunion is at the bottom; and I denounce it to the American people. Under the pretext of getting Texas into the Union, the scheme is to get the South out of it.”

Charles Sumner, who hardly would have defended the old Van Buren, admired “the Van Buren of to-day,—the veteran statesman, sagacious, determined, experienced, who at an age when most men are rejoicing to put off their armor girds himself anew, and enters the lists as the champion of freedom.

That was a more than respectable performance, especially given that the Free Soil party could not get on the ballot in the South, with the exception of Virginia, where Van Buren won a grand total of nine votes. When some of his supporters claimed fraud, a Virginian answered memorably: “Yes Fraud! And we’re still looking for the son-of-a-bitch who
voted nine times!”

Throughout the decade before the Civil War, Van Buren enjoyed seniority among the ex-presidents, ultimately resembling one of the elderly patriarchs invented by Faulkner, who outlives first his own cohort, then his children’s, until no one is quite sure who he was in the first place.

Van Buren had only so much revolution in him. In 1858 he told a visitor, “I have nothing to modify or change. The end of slavery will come—amid terrible convulsion, I fear, but it will come.”

He lingered into the war’s second year, and then expired at 2 a.m. on July 24, 1862, a day and a half after Lincoln read the first draft of his Emancipation Proclamation to a startled cabinet. Van Buren could hardly have chosen his entrance and exit more dramatically.

But to this day, there have been sufficiently few biographies of Martin Van Buren that a reader with time on his hands (and what other kind of Van Buren acolyte is there?) can reasonably expect to read every work on Van Buren ever written—something that would be impossible to say about the other giants of the early republic

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Confederate Women

Posted on December 11, 2025 by smellincoffee

Continuing in my march through Bell Irwin Wiley’s social histories of the Civil War,   I bought Confederate Women immediately after reading Billy Yank.    Confederate Women looks at the diaries and letters of three socially prominent southern belles and finished with a fourth section on those whose blood ran less azure. Although Wiley has written elsewhere about how strongly southern women supported the war effort materially – sewing clothes and that sort of thing – his three women cataloged are evident exceptions, as they appear to spend most of their time living in a Jane Austen novel, attending social events and talking. This was a fun read, though I wish its fourth section were the main of the book.  

The first chapter is drawn from the wartime diary of Mary Chestnut, which was later published as A Diary from Dixie. Wiley comments on the diary’s issue-laden publication: not only  did Chestnut censor herself to a degree after she began thinking she might publish it, but the diary was later revised by Chestnut herself in the postwar years, and then further changed by an editor to make it more ‘readable’.  These edits, however, were deeper than line-editing:  not surprisingly,  a book published after her death during the bourbon restoration period of Southern history  contained omissions of her criticism of slavery,  as well as minor related edits. She declared of one man whom she disdained that he could always be found in the company of a looking glass, a whisky bottle, or a Negro woman;  later editions simply referred to a bottle or a woman. (I am not sure that omitting whisky would have any effect at all: no one reads a phrase as that and thinks  the man was nursing a bottle of milk or apple juice!)  Chesnut’s husband was an aide to President Jefferson Davis, so she spends time in both Richmond and Montgomery and was on close social terms with a later subject of the book, Varina Davis. 

The second subject is easily the most forgettable, as she spends the war moving from friend’s home to friend’s home as a refugee, gossiping all the while.  The third main section concludes with Varina Davis, and because most of her letters have not survived – she deliberately destroyed her intimate correspondence with her husband – it’s based on more secondary sources.  In my past reading I have only encountered Davis as president,  typically having issues with his generals: it’s interesting to meet him here as a man, one who was described as hard as flint outside the home but soft as molten wax before his wife.  He was widowed early by another woman, evidently, and withdrew from society to fuss about on his farm and hole up in his brother’s library reading:  it was meeting  Varina that drew him out into society again, and based on her portrait I cannot blame him. I enjoyed this chapter on Varina: while she did her best to be a proper lady of society and First Lady of the Confederacy, she had an easy sense of humor that led to some social gaffes, like guffawing over mistakes instead of cooing sympathetically. 

The fourth part, which merits and receives a larger portion than the individual subjects preceding it, covers women in general during the war.  Wiley notes that Confederate women were extremely passionate about the Cause, urging their men – husbands and sons – to enlist. One woman lost nine sons to the war. Wiley cites one woman in my own hometown who sent a  young lad who was slow to enlist a petticoat, along with the instructions to wear these if he did not wish to serve.  They were also instrumental to wartime production, sometimes being responsible for their boys’ uniforms. Households in areas as yet untouched by Yankee marauders could also send boxes of food (cured meat, bread, &c), at least until transportation broke down in late 1864.  The aforementioned women were not good illustrations of this, as they seemed to principally occupy themselves attending parties and talking – though they had plenty of zeal for the Cause.  Women took over the administration of their home farms or plantations themselves,  and without their men found that the workload was onerous indeed: those who lived near the front often found what little they had stolen by both Union and Confederate troops, and those women who lived in areas that Federal raiders were savaging often fled if they could.  Casual, senseless violence – the destruction of clothes and household goods, even the molestation of women – was all too common, and it was not restricted to confirmed “rebel” families:  Wiley records Yankee troopers pillaging slave cabins and raping women there, as well.   This section ends with Wiley observing that the Civil War changed relations between men and women,  leading to more overall agency for women and a slight softening of the patriarchy. This final section is broad, covering all classes and races as best it can given the lack of documentation on poorer black and white women.

This was an interesting collection, though the last section was easily the best. I enjoyed Chestnut and Davis’ sections well enough, especially seeing as I’ve intended on reading A Diary from Dixie at some point and appreciate knowing that parts of it are suspect. I could have done with much less social chatter and more of the content that arrives last, but on the whole this was an illuminating little read.

Quotations

The Sandusky, Ohio, Register of December 12, 1864, reported: ‘*One day last week one of the rebel officers . . . [imprisoned on] Johnson’s Island gave birth to a ‘bouncing boy.’ This is the first instance of the father giving birth to a child, that we have heard of . . . tis [also] the first case of a woman in rebel service that we have heard of, though they are noted for goading their own men in[to] the army, and for using every artifice . . . to befog and befuddle some of our men.’’!

On August 29, 1861, Mary Chesnut noted in her diary: *‘ All manner of things . . . come over the border under the huge hoop skirts now worn… . Not legs but arms are looked for under hoops.’’

‘There were just not enough daylight hours . . . for her to do all the tasks that must be done and still cultivate her crop. She would get all the children to bed . . . and then go out to the fields to work at night by the light of the moon.’’?

Captain Charles Wills of an Illinois regiment wrote from near Oxford, Mississippi, in December 1862: ‘‘Rebels though they are, ’tis shocking and enough to make one’s blood boil to see the manner in which some of our folks have treated them. Trunks have been knocked to pieces with muskets when the women stood by, offering the keys . . . bed clothing and ladies’ clothing carried off and all manner of deviltry imaginable perpetrated. Of course the scoundrels who do this kind of work would be severely punished if caught, but the latter is almost impossible. Most of the mischief is done by the advance of the army… . the d——d thieves even steal from the Negroes!’’

“ A Wisconsin corporal wrote at the conclusion of Sherman’s March to the Sea’ in December 1864: ‘‘The cruelties practiced on the campaign toward citizens have been enough to blot a more sacred cause than ours. We hardly deserve success. . . . Straggler’s under nobody’s charge . . . ransack the houses, taking every knife and fork, spoon, or anything else they take a fancy to, break open trunks and bureaus, taking women or children’s clothing, or tearing them to pieces. . . besides taking everything eatable that can be found. . . . there is certainly a lack of discipline in our army.’’

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WWW Wednesday

Posted on December 10, 2025 by smellincoffee

WHAT have you finished reading recently? The Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson. Review in progress. I have three more ACW books stacking up: Confederate Women, by Bell Irwin Wiley; 1858, by Bruce Chadwick; and The Civil War: An Aerial Portrait by Sam Abell.

WHAT are you reading now? Nothing immediately, as I just finished a thousand page history book, though I am reading bits of Deadly Passions, Dangerous Sins, a review of how Orthodox monks adopted practices to combat anger, etc that modern psychology has some similarities to. I am also listening to an Audible production of The Silver Chair, but it’s early days yet: Eustace and Jill have only just met Puddleglum.

WHAT are you reading next? I need to return to the zombie insects book for my biology read and then knock out something for local astronomy. I was hoping Starry Messenger would work for that category but it was far too general. I also began nosing into a Martin van Buren biography. As part of my America @ 250 reading next year, I want to begin filling out my presidential biographies list. It’s fairly dismal at the moment. I may post it as a page next year….we shall see.

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Selections from the Battle Cry of Freedom

Posted on December 9, 2025 by smellincoffee

Quotes

Austere and humorless, Davis did not suffer fools gladly. He lacked Lincoln’s ability to work with partisans of a different persuasion for the common cause. Lincoln would rather win the war than an argument; Davis seemed to prefer winning the argument.

The Internal Revenue Act of 1862 taxed almost everything but the air northerners breathed. It imposed sin taxes on liquor, tobacco, and. playing cards; luxury taxes on carriages, yachts, billiard tables, jewelry, and other expensive items; taxes on patent medicines and newspaper advertisements; license taxes on almost every conceivable profession or service except the clergy; stamp taxes, taxes on the gross receipts of corporations, banks, insurance companies, and a tax on the dividends or interest they paid to investors; value-added taxes on manufactured goods and processed meats; an inheritance tax; and an income tax. The law also created a Bureau of Internal Revenue, which remained a permanent part of the federal government even though most of these taxes (including the income tax) expired several years after the end of the war. The relationship of the American taxpayer to the government was never again the same.

The tactical predominance of the defense helps explain why the Civil War was so long and bloody. The rifle and trench ruled Civil War battlefields as thoroughly as the machine-gun and trench ruled those of World War I.

Disease was a greater threat to the health of Civil War soldiers than enemy weapons. This had been true of every army in history. Civil War armies actually suffered comparatively less disease mortality than any previous army. While two Union or Confederate soldiers died of disease for each one killed in combat, the ratio for British soldiers in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars had been eight to one”and four to one. For the American army in the Mexican War it had been seven to one. Only by twentieth century standards was Civil War disease mortality high. Nevertheless, despite improvement over previous wars in this respect, disease was a crippling factor in Civil War military operations.

“You remember my speaking to you of what I called your over-cautiousness,” Lincoln wrote [General McClellan] on October 13. “Are you not over-cautious when you assume that you can not do what the enemy is constantly doing?” McClellan had argued that his men could not march twenty miles a day and fight without full stomachs and new shoes. Yet the rebels marched and fought with little food and no shoes.

As the two armies bedded down a few hundred yards from each other, their bands commenced a musical battle as prelude to the real thing next day. Northern musicians blared out “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail Columbia,” and were answered across the way by “Dixie” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” One band finally swung into the sentimental strains of “Home Sweet Home”; others picked it up and soon thousands of Yanks and Rebs who tomorrow would kill each other were singing the familiar words together.

This sense of Butternut identity with the South and hostility to the Northeast gave rise to talk among western Democrats of a “Northwest Confederacy” that would reconstruct a Union with the South, leaving New England out in the cold until she confessed the error of her ways and humbly petitioned for readmission. However bizarre such a scheme appears in retrospect, it commanded much rhetorical support during the war. “The people of the West demand peace, and they begin to more than suspect that New England is in the way,” warned Vallandigham in January 1863. “If you of the East, who have found this war against the South, and for the negro, gratifying to your hate or profitable to your purse, will continue it . . . [be prepared for] eternal divorce between the West and the East.”

While 100 percent of the congressional Republicans supported the draft bill, 88 percent of the Democrats voted against it. Scarcely any other issue except emancipation evoked such clearcut partisan division. Indeed, Democrats linked these two issues in their condemnation of the draft as an unconstitutional means to achieve the unconstitutional end of freeing the slaves. A democratic convention in the Midwest pledged that “we will not render support to the present Administration in its wicked Abolition crusade [and] we will resist to the death all attempts to draft any of our citizens into the army.” Democratic newspapers hammered at the theme that the draft would force white working men to fight for the freedom of blacks who would come north and take away their jobs.

Although civilians were going hungry in Mississippi, Grant was confident that his soldiers would not. A powerful army on the move could seize supplies that penniless women and children could not afford to buy. For the next two weeks the Yankee soldiers lived well on hams, poultry, vegetables, milk and honey as they stripped bare the plantations in their path. Some of these midwestern farm boys proved to be expert foragers. When an irate planter rode up on a mule and complained to a division commander that plundering troops had robbed him of everything he owned, the general looked him in the eye and said: “Well, those men didn’t belong to my division at all, because if they were my men they wouldn’t have left you that mule.”

“Amnesty, sir, applies to criminals. We have committed no crime. At your door lies all the misery and crime of this war. We are fighting for INDEPENDENCE and that or extermination we will have. You may ’emancipate’ every negro in the Confederacy, but we will be free. We will govern ourselves, if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked and every Southern city in flames.” – Jefferson Davis, letter to Abraham Lincoln.

Clement Vallandigham’s story is wild. He was exiled by Lincoln for speaking out against the war, ran for governor of Ohio from exile in Canada, and then accidentally shot himself five years after the war ended while using a pistol in a courtroom demonstration.

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