Barack Obama and James Buchanan

What kind of President will Barack Obama be? A lot depends on what happens during his term of office.

Take James Buchanan, President of the United States of America from March 1856 until March 1860. James Buchanan was a nice guy, an optimist, a uniter of a fractious Democratic Party. The two big guns, and expected Presidential nominees of that era's Democratic Party, were Stephen A. Douglas and the incumbent President, Franklin Pierce. Pierce was fiercely pro-slavery, so Douglas supporters nixed him. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, sponsored by Douglas, had led to free soilers and slavers waging a small civil war in the Territory of Kansas. Lucky James Buchanan was a minister to England when this all happened. He owned no slaves, being from Pennsylvania, but had no problem with the institution of slavery in the slave states. He got the Democratic nomination because he had done little of importance up until then.

Barack Obama was lucky enough to still be in Illinois when the initial votes on the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions took place in Congress. During the early primaries he hinted to Democratic Party grassroots activists, most of whom had by then turned against the wars (blaming it on George W. Bush, even though almost every Democrat in Congress voted for the wars), that he would have voted against it had he been in Washington. In particular Hillary Clinton was hurt in the primary contests by the perception that she was a militarist. But Obama later united the party by promising to send more troops to Afghanistan. He could be the peace candidate only because John McCain's war rhetoric was even more inflammatory.

Just as George W. Bush's Presidency came to be defined by the September 11, 2001 attacks by heroes of the Islamic revolution, James Buchanan's Presidency was defined by the Dred Scott decision. The U.S. Supreme Court in its wisdom declared that slaves could not be freed by any law passed by a state or Congress, and in fact did not even have the right to start a lawsuit in the court system. Many Americans at that time were against slavery, but were willing to leave it alone in the slave states. Those who wanted to actually end slavery everywhere, Abolitionists, were a tiny, but active, minority. The Dred Scott decision pushed many people into the Abolitionist camp, and even more people into the welcoming arms of the Republican Party.

Before James Buchanan's last day of office, several slave states had withdrawn from the United States of America. Buchanan himself was for keeping slavery and keeping all the states united. He has to be rated as the least successful U.S. President. Then again, he was dealt the worst cards of any U.S. President.

What I want to emphasize is that more often than not, events make of break a Presidency. Herbert Hoover did not campaign for office expecting a Great Depression. Harry Truman did not know that Chiang Kai-Shek would not be able to hold onto power in China. Neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richand Nixon thought that the armed peasants of Vietnam could defeat the army that defeated both the Nazis and the World War II era Japanese military establishment.

If we are lucky and he is lucky, most of the economic storm will have passed by the time Barack Obama enters office. He will have the uneventful kind of Presidency we associate with Calvin Coolidge. Maybe he will work with Congress to fix a thing or two, like the health care system.

On the other hand, it seems like the pace of change is accelerating to roller-coaster rates. Six months ago one of the biggest economic concerns was inflation; today it is inflation. No one was worried much about Afghanistan when George W. Bush took office. Climate change seems to be accelerating. Anything could happen.

And in their wisdom, with the help of Madison Avenue and a bunch of special interest groups, the American people have chosen Barack Obama to be President for four years. A man most noted for ducking controversial votes in the Illinois legislature. Maybe that is a good thing, maybe it is time for a mellow, compromising U.S. President again. It will be interesting to watch.

Barack Obama and Franklin Pierce

The Barack Obama campaign has done a lot of talking about hope and change. But certainly he has brought no change to the two-party system. Compare that to the elections of the 1850's, cumulating in the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Now that was change, and it was change for the better. And it required the destruction of a major political party, the Whig Party, to get done.

I have been thinking a lot about the political psychology of American citizens. One of my litmus tests is war crimes. Why do almost all Americans apply a double standard for war crimes and crimes against humanity? I have found this to be just as true of most "progressives" and liberals as of conservative Americans.

To get at the heart of that matter, I have been studying the history of relations between the United States of America and Japan (See The U.S. Bullies Japan in the 1850's). These relations started while Franklin Pierce was President of the United States. Yet like most Americans, I know little about President Pierce.

It turns out (I am garnering this from Bailey's The American Pageant, but you can look at the President Franklin Pierce Wikipedia page) Pierce was a member of the Democratic Party. He was from New Hampshire, where he had worked his way up from the state legislature to the U.S. Senate. He sounds a bit like Barack: "youngish, erect, smiling, and convivial." The Democratic Party at the time was many things, but foremost it was the party of slavery. "As a pro-Southern Northerner he was acceptable to the slavery wing of the Democratic Party." [Bailey p. 384-385]

Pierce's main opponent was the Whig Party candidate, General Winfield Scott. But the Whigs were divided internally over the slavery question, with the Southern Whigs of course for slavery and the Northern Whigs mostly against it. Scott's campaign was inept. Pierce won with 1.6 million popular votes to 1.4 million for Scott. Campaigns vague on issues are not new. The Pierce campaign slogan was "We'll Pierce 'em in '52."
More important in retrospect, but obscure at the time, other parties took about 6% of the vote. John P. Hale of the Free Soil party picked up 6% of the vote. This party would become the nucleus of the Republican Party, which would first field a presidential candidate in 1856.

Pierce's Presidency was as predatory as any in U.S. history. His Secretary of War was Jefferson Davis, who would later become President of the Confederate States of America. The Democratic Party had, as a goal, acquiring more territory where slavery would be legal. The new territories recently muscled away from Mexico would mostly become Free states. Cuba was the prime target, but ironically it would be the Republicans who grabbed Cuba later in the century. Anti-slavery Americans killed the Pierce administration's attempt to buy Cuba. However, Pierce did preside over the Gadsden Purchase.

The pro-slavery Democrats thought they won a victory in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Instead they re-opened the slavery question that most people thought had been settled by the Missouri Compromise. Both the Whigs and the Democrats had both pro-slavery and anti-slavery wings, but the anti-slavery wing of the Democrats was weak. As the abolition of slavery increasingly became an issue, anti-slavery Democrats defected to the new Republican Party.

We like say things like, "it was President Pierce who sent a war fleet under Perry to attack Japan in 1854." But Franklin Pierce just happened to be President when the ruling elite of this nation decided Japan's time was up. Winfield Scott would have done the same thing. At least in 1852 electing a civilian, rather than a general, did not affect the level of aggression in U.S. foreign policy.

There have been some truly powerful Presidents in U.S. history, notably Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But most U.S. Presidents can exercise their judgment only over a limited set of options. Those options are presented by the ruling class. In Pierce's era that ruling class consisted mainly of slavers and other very wealthy business people. They wanted to exploit China and Japan; they wanted to build railroads; they wanted to advance the industrial revolution. And they did all that. They were not united in their support for the institution of slavery, or in how they saw the federal government's relationship to state governments, so they fought the War Between the States.