James Buchanan
James Buchanan

Author: Jean H. Baker

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9780805069464

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1. Buchanan, James, 1791-1868 2. Presidents United States Biography 3. United States - Politics and Government - 1857-1861.

James Buchanan
James Buchanan

Author: Megan M. Gunderson

Publisher: ABDO Publishing Company

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 42

ISBN-13: 1617850942

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The United States president preserves, protects, and defends the U.S. Constitution. Each president's term influences events in America and around the world for years to come. This biography introduces young readers to the life of James Buchanan, beginning with his childhood in Cove Gap and Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. Information about Buchanan's education at Dickinson College and his early career as a lawyer is discussed. In addition, his family and personal life, as well as his retirement years at Wheatland, during which he supported the Union during the American Civil War and published Mr. Buchanan's Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion, are highlighted. Easy-to-read text details Buchanan's military service during the War of 1812 and his political career in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served on the House Committee on the Judiciary, as minister to Russia under President Andrew Jackson, in the U.S. Senate, where he served on the Committee on Foreign Relations, as secretary of state under President James K. Polk, during which he negotiated with England over the Oregon territory, tried to prevent the Mexican War, and supported the Wilmot Proviso and the Compromise of 1850, and as minister to Great Britain under President Franklin Pierce, during which he signed the Ostend Manifesto. Finally, students will explore key events from Democratic president Buchanan's administration, including the Dred Scott case, Bleeding Kansas and the Lecompton Constitution, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and the secession of seven Southern states prior to the beginning of the American Civil War. Beautiful graphics showcase the primary source documents and photographs. A timeline, fast facts, and sidebars help put essential information at students' fingertips. In addition, a quick-reference chart provides easy access to facts about every U.S. president. Checkerboard Library is an imprint of ABDO Publishing Company.

Bosom Friends
Bosom Friends

Author: Thomas J. Balcerski

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-08-02

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0190914602

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The friendship of the bachelor politicians James Buchanan (1791-1868) of Pennsylvania and William Rufus King (1786-1853) of Alabama has excited much speculation through the years. Why did neither marry? Might they have been gay? Or was their relationship a nineteenth-century version of the modern-day "bromance"? In Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King, Thomas J. Balcerski explores the lives of these two politicians and discovers one of the most significant collaborations in American political history. He traces the parallels in the men's personal and professional lives before elected office, including their failed romantic courtships and the stories they told about them. Unlikely companions from the start, they lived together as congressional messmates in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse and became close confidantes. Around the nation's capital, the men were mocked for their effeminacy and perhaps their sexuality, and they were likened to Siamese twins. Over time, their intimate friendship blossomed into a significant cross-sectional political partnership. Balcerski examines Buchanan's and King's contributions to the Jacksonian political agenda, manifest destiny, and the increasingly divisive debates over slavery, while contesting interpretations that the men lacked political principles and deserved blame for the breakdown of the union. He closely narrates each man's rise to national prominence, as William Rufus King was elected vice-president in 1852 and James Buchanan the nation's fifteenth president in 1856, despite the political gossip that circulated about them. While exploring a same-sex relationship that powerfully shaped national events in the antebellum era, Bosom Friends demonstrates that intimate male friendships among politicians were--and continue to be--an important part of success in American politics.

The Worst President--The Story of James Buchanan
The Worst President--The Story of James Buchanan

Author: Garry Boulard

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2015-03-23

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1491759623

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Just 24 hours after former President James Buchanan died on June 1, 1868, the Chicago Tribune rejoiced: “This desolate old man has gone to his grave. No son or daughter is doomed to acknowledge an ancestry from him.” Nearly a century and a half later, in 2004, writer Christopher Buckley observed “It is probably just as well that James Buchanan was our only bachelor president. There are no descendants bracing every morning on opening the paper to find another heading announcing: ‘Buchanan Once Again Rated Worst President in History.’” How to explain such remarkably consistent historical views of the man who turned over a divided and demoralized country to Abraham Lincoln, the same man regarded through the decades by presidential scholars as the worst president in U.S. history? In this exploration of the presidency of James Buchanan, 1857-61, Garry Boulard revisits the 15th President and comes away with a stunning conclusion: Buchanan’s performance as the nation’s chief executive was even more deplorable and sordid than scholars generally know, making his status as the country’s worst president richly deserved. Boulard documents Buchanan’s failure to stand up to the slaveholding interests of the South, his indecisiveness in dealing with the secession movement, and his inability to provide leadership during the nation’s gravest constitutional crisis. Using the letters of Buchanan, as well as those of more than two dozen political leaders and thinkers of the time, Boulard presents a narrative of a timid and vacillating president whose drift and isolation opened the door to the Civil War. The author of The Expatriation of Franklin Pierce: The Story of a President and the Civil War (iUniverse, 2006), Boulard has reported for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and is a business writer for the Albuquerque-based Construction Reporter.

Worst. President. Ever.
Worst. President. Ever.

Author: Robert Strauss

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-10-01

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1493024841

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Worst. President. Ever. flips the great presidential biography on its head, offering an enlightening—and highly entertaining!—account of poor James Buchanan’s presidency to prove once and for all that, well, few leaders could have done worse. But author Robert Strauss does much more, leading readers out of Buchanan’s terrible term in office—meddling in the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, exacerbating the Panic of 1857, helping foment the John Brown uprisings and “Bloody Kansas,” virtually inviting a half-dozen states to secede from the Union as a lame duck, and on and on—to explore with insight and humor his own obsession with presidents, and ultimately the entire notion of ranking our presidents. He guides us through the POTUS rating game of historians and others who have made their own Mount Rushmores—or Marianas Trenches!—of presidential achievement, showing why Buchanan easily loses to any of the others, but also offering insights into presidential history buffs like himself, the forgotten "lesser" presidential sites, sex and the presidency, the presidency itself, and how and why it can often take the best measures out of even the most dedicated men.

President James Buchanan a Biography
President James Buchanan a Biography

Author: Philip Shriver Klein

Publisher: Franklin Classics

Published: 2018-10-15

Total Pages: 548

ISBN-13: 9780343281977

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