I don’t agree Buchanan was inept. Maybe he didn’t do it on purpose, but he had the right idea, and we should’ve let them go peacefully. Some brilliant maneuver may have empowered him to bring the seceders back in peacefully, or somehow made the subsequent war mellower. I don’t know; anything’s possible. It’s just that you can’t call Buchanan the most divisive president of the first 200 years or even a failure just because he wasn’t a Machiavellian genius.
We operate under the delusion that Lincoln stepped in amidst a crisis, that events moved him, and somehow that secession was not only unconstitutional or whatever, but also a threat to the North and moreover that it was the North that was attacked, and Lincoln only kept it together. What a threadbare string of halftruths. Buchanan faced the exact same situation with other federal property as did Lincoln with Sumter, save the fireworks show. Yet somehow his administration avoided all out war. You can argue it only did so by puttees nh off the deciding day, but that’s begging the question. Why did Sumter lead to 600,000 deaths? Why was it there that the decision point lay? Because Lincoln deemed it so, I say, and no other reason.
The South blundered in firing on Sumter started. But what was the blunder? Not the one we read about in history books. It started A war. But that war could’ve started with any seizute of federal property. Washington was within its rights to fight for redress, to get the property back, to be compensated, and to punish tge South. However, Sumter did not suddenly make secession illegal. Nor did it justify the eventual war. No, that war was started by one man and one man alone: the same man who without just provocation blockaded Southern ports and the same man who unconstitutionally called for tens of thousands of troops, thus driving the rest of the to-be confederates out of the union.
This is a delicate point, and bears repeating. The civil war we know from history books was not inevitable given the circumstances facing Buchanan. It was if secession was to be reversed, you may say. But ut was Buchanan’s position that he was legally powerless to do anything about it, and I tend to agree. The only other way we get to a Lincoln war is if the South invades the North, which wasn’t going to happen. (At least not soon. I can’t speak for what a Confederacy might have done in subsequent years or decades.)
How us it, anyway, even accepting the history books’ history, that Buchanan gets all the blame and Lincoln all the credit? Lincoln’s solution to the crisis ended up in 600,000 deaths and untold millions in damage, anyway. I realize historians worship Power, but is action really THAT much preferable to inaction?
The Lincoln fairy tale sells books and movies to this day. It is so much reconstructed BS. Lincoln was a racist to the nth degree and was a war monger. Now we have a Roman Temple with him on the throne. Oh brother what utter BS.
I would argue that Buchanan should have either (1) recognized the South's right to secede, eliminating the cause for war, or (2) immediately mobilized as large an army as necessary and suppressed the secession. His big error was taking a middle position, essentially that the South had no legal right to secede but that he had no legal power to stop them. As he put it, "the power by force of arms to compel a State to remain" was not as he saw it among the "enumerated powers granted to Congress". I consider taking that position for the period December 1860 to March 1861 to be a fatally flawed - fatal for over 600,000 Americans - and thus inept position. Either decisive position, whether in favor of secession or opposed, would have been infinitely better.