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By Root 1682 0

sharp-set New England man jostled the thicker-skinned and darker-hued Southerner.”54 Then, just two days later, the Supreme Court—having received discreet encouragement from the president-elect—handed down its Dred Scott decision. So much for national unity. For the next four years, Buchanan buried himself in the minutiae of office, toiling sixteen-hour days at the White House; some called him the hardest-working president in history. He labored over multiple handwritten drafts of even the most mundane letter, and each routine official document—whether a land grant, a military commission, or a consular appointment—could not receive the president’s signature without his careful perusal of every line. It surprised no one that he showed no desire to seek reelection in 1860. As Buchanan’s term drew toward its close, the president would tell anyone who would listen that he couldn’t wait to get out of the accursed White House and back to his Lancaster County estate. In any case, there was little danger he would have been asked to remain. By then, millions of Northerners detested him as an appeaser of the slave power, while Southerners distrusted him as a weak and vacillating ally at best. Both sides despised the corruption that had seeped into federal officialdom under his stewardship. Neither would have wished the secession crisis to happen on his watch.

Though Buchanan may already have proven a spectacularly ineffectual leader, he was neither a villain nor a coward, despite what his enemies said at the time and what his detractors have said since. When secession loomed in the weeks after Lincoln’s election, he stepped into the breach with the mightiest weapon at his disposal: his pen. He had always been a man who trusted pieces of paper to solve things—witness his misplaced faith in Dred Scott—and so now he set out to compose a document that would freeze disunion in its tracks.

At the end of each year, it was the president’s responsibility to issue an annual message to Congress, the precursor to today’s State of the Union address. Buchanan began writing his just a day or two after Lincoln was elected, and for the next month he did little but work on the draft, anxious that the document should be ready to send to the lame-duck Congress when it opened its session on December 3. As chief executive of the nation, Buchanan felt it was his role to serve as high arbiter of the unfolding conflict, expressing judgments that all factions would have to concede were wise and fair.

Toward that end he revised and polished the composition numerous times, reading various sections aloud to his Northern and Southern cabinet members and asking for comments, which were naturally so contradictory of one another that the poor president found himself doing far more scribbling and crossing out than he could have anticipated. (The only point on which everyone concurred was how felicitously written it was.) Toward the end of November, he welcomed Senator Davis into his office to endure a full recitation. The Mississippian made many helpful suggestions—all of which Buchanan “very kindly accepted,” Davis would recall much later—although by the time the document was complete, it had gone through so many further drafts that Davis could no longer find in it much to agree with. Still, the president dutifully toiled, though he was now feeling increasingly unwell and, instead of going into his office, would work in his private library, dressed in a silk robe and chewing on an unlit cigar. He at last finished his opus, now running to some fourteen thousand words, at the beginning of December. (To be fair, Buchanan expended some of those words addressing not merely the crisis of the Union but also such other pressing matters as crop failures in Kansas, Chinese-American diplomatic relations, and problems with mail delivery on the Pacific coast.) By this time, of course, South Carolina’s leaders had set a date for their secession convention and were cheerfully making plans for their state’s future as an independent republic, while the rest of the cotton states