BuchananEssay Preview: BuchananReport this essayDescribe President James Buchanans attempts to settle the problem of Bleeding Kansas. What powers of the presidency might he have used to bring about a more acceptable solution?
In the mid 19th century, internal contention over the issue of slavery was it its peak. Among the most violent and damaging manifestations of this conflict took place in Kansas, where a series of political and physical confrontation between Free Staters and pro-slavery Border Ruffians left the state and its people in ravages. Labeled “Bleeding Kansas” by Horace Greenley of the New York Tribune, the devastating attempts of these near-terrorist groups to influence the slavery policy of Kansas before its grant of statehood realized a horrifying climax to the internal disputation over slavery in America.
Bleeding Kansas is most noteworthy for the terrible violence involved, and the innumerable fights that broke out among those involved collectively brought the death of 56 casualties. But not all the fighting done was guerilla warfare: in the political sphere, a war was being waged concerning the selection of a constitution to be used to govern the state of Kansas. Several constitutions were drafted, including the 1855 Topeka Constitution, which created a shadow Free-State government essentially by fiat. In 1857, however, the balance was shifted, and a constitutional convention resulted in the draft of the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution. As the ratification vote failed to offer them a means to cast their ballot against slavery, abolitionist forces boycotted the election. Willfully ignoring the disagreement within Kansas, President James Buchanan accepted the Lecompton Constitution and urged the granting of statehood to the apparently pro-slavery Kansas. Congress disagreed with the President and ordered another election within the state. By the second election, the tables turned again and the pro-slavery forces were boycotting the political process in Kansas, and thus the anti-slavery forces easily claimed victory and defeated the hated document. After much debate and confusion, the Lecompton Constitution ultimately met its demise when it was determined that it did not accurately represented the will of the majority. By mid-1859, a new document called the Wyandotte Constitution was written which represented the prevailing abolitionist view, and was approved by the electorate by a 2-to-1 margin. After a half-decade, Kansas finally entered the Union as a free state, but the controversy that so lengthened the process of achieving statehood was anything but settled and done with.
President Buchanans stance on slavery was very much determined by his personal livelihood, and thus he favored the rights of slave owners and sympathized with the Cuba-coveting slave expansionists. Finding an archrival in Senator Stephen Douglas, Buchanan was a staunch defender of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, or the belief that the residents of a state should themselves determine the legality of slavery therein, but implied that a territory could not prohibit slavery until it was ready for statehood. Douglas fought the President on this issue and prevailed, but at the cost of ripping the Democratic party apart. Despising both abolitionists and free-soil Republicans, Buchanan often lumped the two together in his politics. Buchanan saw no injustice
Determined to win support from both Republicans and Democrats, and to build an independent, national government, Buchanan was willing to provide amnesty to all illegal slaves of American citizens born in a single state. In 1924, the Senate passed a bill authorizing the federal government to enforce the “Acts of July [1927, signed by George Washington] on the 23rd day of July in order to alleviate the suffering endured by Africans under the [Roosevelt] policy of mass deportation. The law was then enacted into law, and within half a half-century, about two million African citizens had been sent to live outside of the United States, most of them children.
Buchanan’s political leadership was a matter of personal, personal decision. As the late Senator Louis Gainsbourg once put it: “Buchanan is the President of the United States, not of his family and his friends, and he does not understand the significance of his party’s support of the bill. He does not see himself as a Republican, even as the President, but as a Democrat, as we are supposed to be.”
After the Civil War, Buchanan turned to a political career in Boston, where he began a political advocacy group called Boston Freedom, which was formed in 1926, to help civil rights advocates nationwide. He served as an Illinois representative for many years, until he resigned in 1968 as a delegate to become a candidate for Illinois’ state senate for a third term[.] He took over as a delegate to the 1972 general election for the Republican nomination,[.] And in 1975 the Democratic Party officially endorsed Buchanan,[.]
Despite his opposition to the Vietnam War, Buchanan supported the war in the South, and at the same time the United States continued to withdraw from Vietnam. By the middle of 1980, he was still in Vietnam, but he was now ready to make an even greater effort to stop American troops from being sent to fight Vietnam. Despite the American policy of non-intervention in Vietnam on a permanent basis, he still supported American troops in their home territory, saying they were an essential part of the American mission in the region. He told the New York Times that, “the military, as in every war, is a war, and unless we have the discipline to do the right thing by our soldiers, we cannot do it in their backyard.”[.]
Buchanan was widely regarded as a civil rights activist who served as the chief organizer of the civil rights movement. In his inaugural address at the Republican Convention in Chicago in 1979, Buchanan lamented the poor quality of the Negro vote, describing it as a “myth, a myth that the Negro has the right to make his own destiny.” However, his most recent criticism of the GOP, the American Civil Liberties Union, highlighted that “[w]e have made it clear in the South that a citizen cannot vote for the candidate of the candidate of his own choice and therefore has no say over the election of any candidate in the house or the Supreme Court.” In 1990, he defended his efforts to outlaw non