The South was going to move to secession anyway. All the rest was pretense.
The property rights issue was becoming too big to ignore anymore. Buchanan today would be named John McCain.
Part of the problem with Buchanan is that he acted too late; he needed to reinforce the coastal forts and internal locations where stocks of federal weapons were located and which were easily taken at the start of the war by the Confederacy; the war would have been much shorter, at far less cost to both sides.
Ooh, that’s below the belt. At worst, Buchanan was incompetent. McQueeg is an outright traitor.