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By Root 1837 0

for secession. More than a few from each faction had come for the punch and cake but disdained to shake their host’s hand. The president and his niece were receiving guests in the (solid) Blue Room, surely just an unfortunate coincidence. As at all their levees, the slim, blond Miss Lane was dressed to perfection, and Mr. Buchanan’s tall figure, at least from across the room, looked stately in its black frock coat and high collar. His head, as usual, was cocked quizzically to one side from some odd nervous tic, as though he had always just failed to catch the last thing that was said. It was only when guests drew closer that they noticed the president’s customary aspect altered. His hair—which a female admirer had once found as silky and glistening as the tail feathers of the glass birds of paradise in Barnum’s Museum—was now shockingly white. Buchanan’s one good eye was dull and unfocused, his head more askew than ever. “It was his last New Year as President,” the New York World’s correspondent mused afterward, “perhaps the last of our republic; and as he went through the hollow mockery of the occasion, he could not but feel how unreal it was.”50

It should never have ended thus. James Buchanan had been one of the best-qualified men ever to win the presidency: so long and diligent had been his career in government that he liked to refer to himself deprecatingly as “the Old Public Functionary.” Over the past half century, he had served his nation ably as representative to Congress, senator, and secretary of state. Though born the son of a country storekeeper, he had represented the United States with distinction at the courts of Czar Nicholas and Queen Victoria, returning home with all the subtle expertise in diplomatic graces to be learned in St. Petersburg and London. At the Court of St. James’s, indeed, he had been so scrupulous as to agonize for weeks over what to wear when presenting his credentials to the Queen. Should he costume himself like George Washington in knee breeches and powdered wig? Carry the customary sword of a European envoy? In the end, he steered a prudent middle course, attiring himself in black like an ordinary American gentleman, but bringing the sword along, too. Some might have scoffed, but Buchanan’s admirers saw this as just the kind of evenhandedness that the country needed in its leading statesmen.51 His domestic positions, too, were always judicious. Though a Pennsylvanian, he loathed abolitionist rabble-rousers, never spoke a disparaging word about slavery, and appointed a carefully balanced cabinet of Northerners and Southerners.52

Disunion had long seemed to him such a far-fetched proposition as to be almost existentially impossible. Back in 1832, Buchanan had written in mild frustration to President Jackson about his first visit to the Russian court. The czarina, he said, would not stop talking about the difficulties between the Northern and Southern states—rumors of which had reached even as far as St. Petersburg. Was this not a serious threat to the young republic, she asked, perhaps worse even than the possibility of war with a European power? Buchanan told the president that his efforts to convince her otherwise had been in vain:

I endeavored in a few words to explain this subject to her; but she still persisted in expressing the same opinion, and, of course, I would not argue with her. The truth is, that the people of Europe, and more especially those of this country, cannot be made to understand the operations of our Government. Upon hearing of any severe conflicts of opinion in the United States, they believe what they wish, that a revolution may be the consequence.53

Now it seemed that Her Imperial Highness, surveying American politics from that distant Baltic shore, had been shrewder than he.

Buchanan’s inauguration in 1857 had come at a rare moment of relative concord, and was greeted with such pomp and fanfare that one observer said it resembled an imperial coronation. The swearing-in, another wrote, drew supporters “from every State and Territory in the Union; the pale-faced,