SECURITY BREACH
When you’re president of a country with its knickers in a twist over something as contentious as slavery, you take precautions. Crowds at the White House—which had always been open to the public—had grown over the years, and many feared that someone might take a shot at Pierce. Which is why he became the first U.S. president to have a full-time bodyguard on the government’s tab. His name was Thomas O’Neil, an officer who had served with Pierce in the Mexican War, and he was charged with accompanying the president wherever he went.
Unfortunately, O’Neil was nowhere in sight when, in 1855, someone finally did take a shot at Pierce—with a hard-boiled egg. After being taken into custody, the assailant attempted suicide with a pocketknife. The president took pity on the poor bastard and dropped the charges.
Reckless Driver
One night, while returning from a friend’s house, President Pierce struck an old woman with his carriage in the streets of Washington. He was arrested—but after the officers discovered his identity, they let him go.
PRESIDENT WHAT’S-HIS-NAME
After James Buchanan was chosen as Pierce’s successor in the 1856 election, both presidents were supposed to ride in the inaugural parade. But the event was half over before somebody noticed that Pierce wasn’t there. The committee had forgotten to get him.
If Pierce’s lackluster performance makes his presidency hard to remember, his pro-Southern sentiments would never be forgotten. He was a critic of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, a stance that didn’t go over so well with his neighbors in New Hampshire, who accused him of being a traitor to the Northern cause. When word of Lincoln’s assassination reached Concord, a mob marched on Pierce’s property, angered that he wasn’t displaying a flag. He quickly snatched one up and talked the rabble down, but it was a narrow escape.
Franklin Pierce remains the only New Hampshire native to have become president of the United States. Yet fifty years would pass after his death before citizens of the state could bring themselves to honor him with a statue.
SECRET LIVES OF THE U.S. FREEMASONS
You have only to look at the back of a one-dollar bill to see the influence that Freemasonry has had on American history. See that pyramid with a giant glowing eye over it? It’s a Mason’s symbol, and you can find others in the Washington Monument, on the Capitol Building, and in other official places if you look hard enough.
The origins of Freemasonry may go back to the craftsmen guilds of medieval Europe, but by the seventeenth century, the society had traded in its trowels and mortarboards for quills and philosophy books. Organized to better the lot of mankind through the cultivation of democracy and virtue, the Masons’ secretive lodges offered an opportunity for men of middling birth to better themselves and climb the social ladder. Many of America’s Founding Fathers were Freemasons, and their influence is everywhere, from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution itself.
In 1826, a disillusioned Mason in upstate New York named William Morgan threatened to publish the details of the society’s secret rituals. He soon disappeared, and though his body was never found, nobody doubts that the Masons had murdered him. It soured much of America on the organization, which, despite having played a fundamental role in creating American democracy, now seemed to threaten it. Later, in the 1850s, they transformed themselves into a sort of charitable men’s club, which they remain to this day. As for whether or not they’re still sworn to secrecy upon pain of death, well . . . you’ll have to ask one.
So which presidents were Masons? Here they are: George Washington, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, James Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Gerald Ford.
15 JAMES BUCHANAN
April 23, 1791–June 1, 1868
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus
TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1857–1861
PARTY: Democratic
AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 65
VICE PRESIDENT: John C. Breckenridge
RAN AGAINST: John C. Frémont
HEIGHT: 6′
NICKNAMES: “Ten-Cent Jimmy,” “Bachelor President,” “Old Buck”
SOUND BITE: “My dear sir, if you are as happy on entering the White House as I on leaving it, you are a very happy man indeed” (to Lincoln in 1861).
And so we come to the last president who would attempt to deal with the growing conflict over slavery without force. James Buchanan was as unimaginative and ineffective as his predecessors, leaving a rough-hewn, flappy-eared comedian from Illinois named Abe Lincoln to carry a fractured nation through its bloodiest trial.
Buchanan was a tireless and clever Pennsylvania lawyer whose courtroom gifts earned him a fortune that would support him till the end of his days. His greatest asset in the election of 1856, however, was his absence from the country. Having been appointed ambassador to Great Britain by President Pierce, he was untainted by the turmoil over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which had largely gutted the Democratic party. The new antislavery Republican party performed surprisingly well in the election, but not quite well enough. Buchanan prevailed and became the country’s fifteenth president.
The same absence from controversy that won him the White House would also doom him to failure. Buchanan had no grasp whatsoever of how enormous an issue slavery had become. “What is right and what is practicable are two different things,” he once said. Personally disgusted by the institution of slavery, he considered abolitionists to be a noisy, treasonous lot who’d thrown all reason to the wind. When the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the infamous Dred Scott case, claiming that Congress had no right to outlaw slavery, Buchanan thought the matter was settled. Northern outrage proved him woefully wrong.
Another imbroglio over the new Kansas Constitution made matters worse. Buchanan gave his support to a first draft (called the Lecompton Constitution, after its town of origin) that allowed slavery, but it was boycotted by most of Kansas and eventually rejected by Congress. The president was out of touch, losing allies, and looking like a real bozo.
Buying votes was the least of Buchanan’s offenses. He’s mostly remembered for doing nothing as the entire nation unraveled.
All of which merely strengthened the first political party in American history to take on slavery: the Republicans. Their man Lincoln was considered the Antichrist by agitated Southerners, the vast majority of whom started planning their secession rather than just thinking about it. When Lincoln won the election of 1860, Southern states started hightailing it out of the Union like drunkards from a dry county, and Buchanan did . . . nothing. Nothing at all. Held captive by a legalistic belief that stopping secession was unconstitutional, he embraced his lame-duck status and waited till Lincoln took the reins.
To his dying day, James Buchanan insisted that posterity would vindicate his troubled decisions (or lack thereof). As most historians now agree, he was wrong.
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FUSSBUDGET BLUES
By all accounts, James Buchanan was a pedantic meddler who needed things to be just so. James Polk once claimed that he acted “like an old maid.” Campaign manager John Forney called him “a sort of masculine Miss Fibble.” Buchanan once rejected a payment for more than $15,000 because it was off by ten cents. On another occasion, he discovered that he’d underpaid a food bill by three cents—which he promptly forwarded to the merchant in question. Even his niece, Harriet Lane, who functioned as White House hostess, had a run-in with the president’s nitpicking. Incapable of keeping his nose out of her affairs, Buchanan insisted on intercepting her mail before she received it. Letters were resealed and forwarded on to her with the message “opened by mistake” scrawled on them. Harriet resorted to hiding her correspondence in empty butter jugs that her friends carried in and out of the White House kitchen. Uncle Jimmy never caught on.
A LIFELONG BACHELOR
Buchana
n remains the only president in American history never to have married. But at the age of twenty-eight, he was briefly engaged. His fiancée was Anne Coleman, daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Pennsylvania. After a whirlwind courtship, it looked as if the two had a rosy future together.
But Buchanan’s legal responsibilities took up all of his time, and Anne was not the most emotionally stable of women. She began to feel slighted. Her parents, already concerned that Anne was about to marry beneath her station, filled her head with the notion that young Buchanan was only after her money. Things gradually worsened until Anne finally broke off the engagement. Buchanan was crushed but responded more with polite indignation than fiery passion. Anne went to visit her sister in Philadelphia, where she soon became terribly ill and died. The doctor who treated her until her death was incredulous, claiming he’d never actually seen a person expire from “sheer hysteria” before. Rumors persist to this day that she may have committed suicide.
Buchanan, for his part, wrote a heartfelt letter to Anne’s father in which he pleaded to be allowed to follow her coffin in the mourning procession. It was returned unopened.
MISS NANCY AND AUNT FANCY
Buchanan never again became involved with a woman, though flirtations seemed to surround him the rest of his life, most notably with Dolley Madison’s niece Anna Payne. Others have speculated that Buchanan may have been gay. From the moment they first met in Congress, Buchanan and William Rufus King (who served as vice president in Pierce’s administration) were virtually inseparable, earning them the nicknames “Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy” and “Mr. Buchanan and his wife.”
Party Politics
In contrast to the dreary days of Pierce’s administration, Buchanan’s stay at the White House was one long party. He entertained lavishly, and large, garish gatherings were the norm. Buchanan loved his liquor, and he had legendary stamina. He spent many a long night in the company of fellow lushes and yet never seemed to get drunk. He once chided a merchant for providing champagne in pint bottles (which were quite common back then); they simply weren’t big enough. But Buchanan craved whiskey most of all: His carriage ride to church on Sunday often went by way of Jacob Baer’s distillery, where he would buy himself a ten-gallon cask of “Old J.B.”
NOSE JOB
While serving as secretary of state under James Polk, Buchanan developed a large nasal tumor that required some two years of treatment and surgery to remove.
MEN OF STEAL
In addition to sitting back and watching his nation come apart at the seams, Buchanan presided over an administration that remains one of the most corrupt in American history. During the contentious fight over passage of the Lecompton Constitution, Buchanan and his supporters offered cash to those who voted their way. One estimate puts the total price of “incentives” at more than $30,000, though, of course, this includes diversion of government funds to Democratic candidates, juicy kickbacks from government contracts, etc., etc.
In 1860, as the secession crisis picked up speed, a relative of Secretary of War John Floyd was found to have stolen a staggering $870,000 in federal bonds. Floyd was clearly implicated, and the president asked for his resignation. The whole administration was so corrupt that Congress even turned down a plan to give the president money to buy Cuba—they feared his cabinet would pilfer the funds.
16 ABRAHAM Lincoln
February 12, 1809–April 15, 1865
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius
TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1861–1865
PARTY: Republican
AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 52
VICE PRESIDENT: Hannibal Hamlin (first term); Andrew Johnson (second term)
RAN AGAINST: Stephen Douglas, John C. Breckinridge (first term); George B. McClellan (second term)
HEIGHT: 6′4″
NICKNAMES: “Honest Abe,” “The Railsplitter,” “The Great Emancipator”
SOUND BITE: “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
It was 1862, the Civil War was raging, and President Abraham Lincoln had had enough. Union General George McClellan, wary of engaging the Confederate army full-on, had allowed caution to degenerate into lethargy, and Lincoln’s patience had run out. “My dear McClellan,” the president wired to his sluggish commander. “If you are not using the army, I should like to borrow it for a while.”
Abraham Lincoln had a vibrant sense of humor. And he needed it. If he is the only American president to have successfully brought a broken nation back together again, it is perhaps no coincidence that he was also the funniest man ever to occupy the White House. His story and accomplishments may well stand as history’s greatest testament to the power of laughter.
Born in Kentucky, Lincoln combined a single year of formal education with an insatiable love of reading to become a successful lawyer and politician. He became an Illinois Whig but joined the new Republican party on account of his stand against slavery. In a run for Senate against Stephen Douglas in 1858, he more than confirmed his reputation as an eloquent and persuasive opponent of the hated institution. Though he lost, he challenged Douglas again in 1860—this time for president. To Southerners, Lincoln’s name was emblematic of the sentiment rising in the North against everything they held dear.
The truth was hardly that simple. Voted into the White House by a growing opposition to slavery, Lincoln himself was a moderate more concerned with healing national divisions than with freeing slaves. Despite the vociferous cries of radical Republicans to bring a complete and utter end to slavery, Lincoln wanted union at any price. His inaugural address even included a commitment to enforce the hated fugitive slave laws, which were intended to return runaway slaves to their owners (even those who had fled to free states). Years of bloody warfare would change his mind.
As would the miserable fortunes of Northern armies. Outnumbered and outproduced, the Southern forces nevertheless displayed a galling capacity to defeat one federal army after another. Lincoln, groping for a general who could deliver him victories, went through a slew of incompetents before finally settling on Ulysses Grant. The Emancipation Proclamation—the executive freeing of the slaves, and the one act with which Lincoln’s name is most often associated—was a tactical maneuver: It not only threatened to deny the South its major labor force but also promised to swell Northern armies with freed blacks. That it imbued the Northern cause with a feeling of indisputable morality didn’t hurt, either, especially when nations like England and France were itching to join the fight on the side of the Confederacy. And so Lincoln—who had wanted only to contain slavery in the South—became known as the Great Emancipator.
Lincoln was a giant of a president, both literally and figuratively. When historians rank our chief executives, Honest Abe almost always stands at the head of his class.
Through it all, this unrefined country boy would run fast and loose with the Constitution. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus, which protected every citizen from government search; he blockaded Southern ports from all commerce, an act accepted by the international community only during declared wars against foreign powers; and he called up and nationalized state militias to create an army. His actions, despite outcries from the other two branches of the federal government, were justified in his eyes by the issue of time: The very existence of the nation was at stake, and wasting time to follow correct procedure only strengthened those who had seceded from the Union.
For his troubles, Lincoln would receive a bullet in the back of the head. It is hardly surprising. No sitting president has ever been so vilified. If the South despised him for opposing slavery and answering its challenge with unrestricted force, many in the North looked upon him as a reckless tyrant, a comedic baboon, a latecomer to emancipation, or all of the above. Nevertheless, one is hard pressed to find an American president with more eloquence, humility, compassion, or decisiveness. And let’s not forget humor. Lincoln’s as great as they come. So who had the last laugh?
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A ZOOLOGICAL CURIOSITY
He had charm, insight, a way with words, and—eventually—greatness. But Abraham Lincoln didn’t have looks. “Barnum should buy and exhibit him as a zoological curiosity,” said one New York newspaper. True to form, though, Lincoln was the first to admit his shortcomings. During the famous debates of 1858, Stephen Douglas accused him of being two-faced. “I leave it to my audience,” replied Lincoln. “If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?”
THE SIDE-SPLITTER
Lincoln once referred to laughter as “the joyous, beautiful, universal evergreen of life.” No great man of politics has ever done more to spread the mirth. Here’s a small taste:
Lincoln found himself cornered at a party by Robert Dale Owen, a devotee of spiritualism. After patiently hearing Owen read from a lengthy manuscript on the subject, Lincoln was asked his opinion. “Well,” he offered, “for those who like that sort of thing, I should think that is just about the sort of thing they would like.”
Back in Illinois, Lincoln observed an old woman, garishly dressed in finery and a plumed hat, attempt to cross the street, only to slip and fall in a puddle. “Reminds me of a duck,” said he to a friend. “Feathers on her head and down on her behind.”
While practicing law in Illinois, Lincoln once rented a horse from the local stable to take a case out of town. Upon his return several days later, he asked the owner if he kept this particular horse for funerals. “Certainly not,” said the owner. “That’s good,” replied Lincoln, “because the corpse wouldn’t get there in time for the resurrection.”
Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents Page 7
