The Whig Party, taking advantage of the knowledge gained in previous campaigns, looked around for a famous general, and managed to agree upon Zachary Taylor, who had made an exceedingly brilliant record in the war with Mexico. He was sixty-five years old at the time, a sturdy giant of a man, reared on the frontier, hardened by years of Indian warfare, whose nickname of "Old Rough and Ready" was not a bad description. He caught the popular fancy, for he possessed those qualities which appeal to the plain people, and this, assisted by the division in the ranks of his opponents, won him a majority of the electoral votes. He took the oath of office on March 4, 1849, but, after sixteen months of troubled administration, died suddenly on July 9, 1850.
Millard Fillmore, who had been elected Vice-President, at once took the oath of office as chief executive. He was a New York man, a lawyer, had been a member of Congress, and, as Vice-President, had presided over the bitter slavery debates in the Senate. His sympathies were supposed to be anti-slavery, yet he signed the Fugitive Slave Law, when it was placed before him, much to the chagrin of many people who had voted for him. He signed his own political death-warrant at the same time, for, at the Whig National Convention in 1852, he was defeated for the nomination for President, after a long struggle, by General Winfield Scott, another veteran of the Mexican war. Four years later, Fillmore, having managed to regain, the confidence of his party, secured the Whig nomination unanimously, but was defeated at the polls, and spent the remaining years of his life quietly at his home in Buffalo.
Against General Scott, the Democrats nominated Franklin Scott Pierce, the nomination being in the nature of an accident, though Pierce was in every way a worthy candidate. His family record begins with his father, Benjamin Pierce, who, as a lad of seventeen, stirred by the tidings of the fight at Lexington, left his home in Chelmsford, musket on shoulder, to join the patriot army before Boston. He settled in New Hampshire after the Revolution, and his son Franklin was born there in 1804. He followed the usual course of lawyer, congressman and senator, and served throughout the war with Mexico, rising to the rank of brigadier-general, and securing a reputation second only to that of Scott and Taylor.
At the Democratic convention of 1852, Pierce was not a candidate for the nomination, and did not know that any one intended to mention his name, or even thought of him in that connection. But the convention was unable to agree on a candidate, and on the fourth day and thirty-third ballot, some delegate cast his vote for General Franklin Pierce, of New Hampshire. The name attracted attention, Pierce's career had been distinguished and above reproach, other delegates voted for him, until, on the forty-ninth ballot, he was declared the unanimous choice of the convention. His election was overwhelming, as he carried twenty-seven states out of thirty-one.
Once in the presidential chair, however, this popularity gradually slipped away from him. He found himself in an impossible position, between two fires, for the slavery question was dividing the country more and more and there seemed no possible way to reconcile the warring sections. Pierce, perhaps, made the mistake of trying to placate both, instead of taking his stand firmly with one or the other; and the consequence was that at the convention of 1856, he received a few votes from courtesy, but was never seriously in the running, which resulted in the nomination of James Buchanan. Pierce returned to his home in New Hampshire, to find his friends and neighbors estranged from him by his supposed pro-slavery views, which had yet not been radical enough to win him the friendship of the South; but time changed all that, and his last years were spent in honored and opulent retirement.
James Buchanan was, like Andrew Jackson, of Scotch-Irish descent, but there the resemblance between the two ended, for Buchanan had little of Jackson's tremendous positiveness and strength of character. His disposition was always to compromise, while Jackson's was to fight. Now compromise is often a very admirable thing, but where it shows itself to be impossible and leaves fighting the only resource, the wise man puts all thought of it behind him and prepares for battle. Which is precisely what Buchanan did not do. He had been a lawyer and congressman, minister to Russia, senator, secretary of state and minister to England, and so had the widest possible political acquaintanceship; he was a man of somewhat unusual culture; but, alas! he found that something more than culture was needed to guide him in the troublous times amid which he fell. I have often thought that Buchanan's greatest handicap was his wide friendship, which often made it almost impossible to say no, however much he may have wished to do so. An unknown backwoodsman, like Andrew Jackson, with no favors to return and no friendships to be remembered, could have acted far more effectively.
Buchanan's opponent for the presidency was John C. Frémont, and there was a great stir and bustle among the people who were supposed to support him, but Buchanan won easily, and at once found himself in the midst of the most perplexing difficulties. Kansas was in a state of civil war; two days after his inauguration the Supreme Court handed down the famous Dred Scott decision, declaring the right of any slave-holder to take his slaves as property into any territory; while the young Republican party was siding openly with the abolitionists, and, a very firebrand in a powder-house, in 1859, John Brown seized Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and attempted to start a slave insurrection. Now a slave insurrection was the one thing which the South feared more than any other—it was the terror which was ever present. And so John Brown's mad attempt excited a degree of hysteria almost unbelievable.
Small wonder that Buchanan was soon at his wits' ends. His sympathies were with the slave-holders; he doubted his right to coerce a seceding state; his friendships were largely with southern statesmen—and yet, to his credit be it stated, on January 8, 1860, after secession had become a thing assured, he seems suddenly to have seen his duty clearly, and in a special message, declared his intention to collect the revenues and protect public property in all the states, and to use force if necessary. Taken all in all, his attitude in those trying days was a creditable one—as creditable as could be expected from any average man. What the time needed was a genius, and fortunately one rose to the occasion. Buchanan, harried and despondent, must have breathed a deep sigh of relief when he surrendered the helm to the man who had been chosen to succeed him—the man, by some extraordinary chance, in all the land best fitted to steer the ship of state to safety—the man who was to be the dominant figure of the century in American history.