After some groans at the start of the book, like this line "Only the Democracy remained the voice of the people - North and South", where Democracy isAfter some groans at the start of the book, like this line "Only the Democracy remained the voice of the people - North and South", where Democracy is used as a synonym for the Democratic Party the book turned out to be interesting and better than some of the other books in this series that I've turned to when there wasn't a decent audio biography available.
I haven't gotten to Andrew Johnson, but so far, by the evidence given in this book, Buchanan is easily the worst president to date. While Millard Fillmore was pretty awful and some others were very ineffective Buchanan apparently (I'm not positive no one before him did this) introduced offering public works projects to Congressmen to vote for the minority pro-slavery Kansas Constitution. Besides that he was pushing for a states Constitution that wanted to overturn the Missouri Compromise and allow slavery to spread, and that the Constitution wasn't the will of the majority of people living in the Kansas territory, but rather of a corrupt and violent minority, he also used that wonderful practice of rewarding Congresspeople to vote for things they might be opposed to for their own state / districts benefit.
Buchanan as he's portrayed is on the surface a strict Constitutionalist, when it comes to hands off policies of the South, but bends the Constitution to his will when it will benefit his best friends from the South. For example, he had no problems with instituting the wonderful US foreign policy of sending in troops without declaring war or with the blessing of Congress when he felt that a country had wronged us. Or for wanting to send in troops to a country with the pretext that their government wasn't amiable to US interests (he didn't get to send the troops into Mexico because he didn't like the way they were handling their own affairs, and possibly to try to make a land grab for more territories that would eventually become slave states). Or sending in troops to Utah to put down treasonous Mormons under the rule of Brigham Young. But felt there was just nothing he could possibly do after South Carolina seceded and were threatening to take over Federal forts. He's pretty fucking awful.
My favorite little bit of the book was that he choose his cabinet to be full of fairly extremist Southerners, like Jefferson Davis, because they were his friends and he wanted to have friends to talk to and to sleep over when their wives were out of town. The amusing way the author said that I enjoyed. But, this same group of friends after the election of Lincoln as Buchanan was a lame duck would basically act as spies feeding information to the soon to be Confederate States, and in the case of his Secretary of War actually use the federal government to moves arms into the south, not to try to put down the rebellion, but so the rebellion would be well armed when it came time for the Civil War. It's also possible that Buchanan was trying to give Fort Sumter to the south when he ordered troops out of the fort and to a nearby one that could be easily overrun by the South Carolina militia (by this time his cabinet had disbanded since they had a rebellion to lead, and his new cabinet was able to get it through his head how treasonous his orders were).
It's also possible, in what might seem like the way our two parties act in the past few decades, he might have precipitated the Civil War by spending so much energy demonizing the growing Republican Army that when Lincoln was elected the fear and loathing he had been sowing could have pushed the radical elements of the South to act.
On to Lincoln now, and the abridged version of Carl Sandburg's six volume Biography. Fun fact from that book so far, Lincoln could possibly be the only president to have refereed cock fights. Or at least so far the only president that is mentioned as over seeing cock fighting....more
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