James Buchanan: The Dred Scott Letters, Ostend Manifesto and Secession

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James Buchanan, the 15th president, was born in a Pennsylvania log cabin in 1791 to an Irish immigrant father. Nearly expelled from Dickinson College for vandalism and tavern hopping, he was readmitted after his pastor pleaded his case and graduated with honors, then built a lucrative law practice. In 1819 his fiancée, Anne Caroline Coleman, broke off their engagement amid rumors about his motives and died soon after of a suspected laudanum overdose; her father barred him from the funeral, and Buchanan never married. He helped deliver Pennsylvania to Andrew Jackson in 1828, became minister to Russia and Britain and Secretary of State under James K. Polk, and shared a Washington boarding house for a decade with Alabama politician William R. King.

Serving in Europe in 1854, Buchanan helped draft the Ostend Manifesto, which offered to buy Cuba from Spain and justified seizing it by force if Spain refused. Abroad during the Kansas-Nebraska fight, he won the presidency in 1856, survived a deadly dysentery outbreak at the National Hotel that killed his nephew, and before his inauguration wrote to Justice Robert Grier to bring a Northern justice into the Dred Scott majority. Two days after he urged the country to accept the Court's coming ruling, the decision was published and inflamed the North. After Abraham Lincoln's election, as seven states seceded, Buchanan told Congress that secession was illegal but that he had no authority to use force against a state.

• He was nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other, which kept his head tilted and cocked to one side.
• Andrew Jackson mocked Buchanan and King with names such as Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy, and nieces of both men are believed to have destroyed their letters.
• He sent a fleet and 2,500 Marines to Paraguay to demand an apology and a fine over a skirmish involving an American ship.
• His push for the Corwin Amendment would have permanently protected slavery where it existed.
• Retired at Wheatland, he received death threats, wrote a memoir defending his final months in office, and died in 1868.