Dear Larry,

I agree with you that James Buchanan was not one of the twenty worst Americans. But he was not a good President--and before that, although he had already served as Secretary of State, he was not a very good Minister to England, as I have brought out in some detail in my Pen of Fire: John Moncure Daniel (Kent State Univ. Press, 2002). Daniel, who became our Minister to the Kingdom of Sardinia in Turin when Buchanan was in London, caught Buchanan out in a passport fraud. More importantly, Buchanan imprudently attended a dinner in 1854 given by his Consul, George Sanders, where the guests were leading Europe revolutioniaries--Garibaldi, Mazzini, Herzen, Kossuth and others. Europe then badly needed democratic reform, but if governments had learned about this dinner they might well have cooled if not broken relations with the United States, which I do not think President Pierce or Secretary of State Marcy would have thought in our overall interest.
Best regards--
Peter Bridges

I've also read They Also Ran, and as I recall, the author also thought Fremont would have been a disaster as president.

Excellent post. I always believed Buchanan was in a thoroughly unenviable position, and as such, couldn't get much done at all short of trying to keep the peace, something that just wasn't going to last. I read elsewhere that the Pennsylvanian Buchanan, who hailed from what I understood to be a fairly pro-abolitionist area, had his views shaped by whom many describe as his long-time lover, Senator and later Vice-President William Rufus de Vane King. King, an Alabaman (North Carolinian by birth), was strongly pro-slave. Their relationship was one of those badly-kept secrets (a la Strom Thurmond's half-African-American love child) in Washington circles in the 1830s-50s.

I read the textbook "Presidential Also-Rans" which attempted to analyze the losers in Presidential contests and how their potential administrations would've fared, and, alas, I've since forgotten what their conclusions regarding former California Senator Fremont were (Fremont himself just having come over from the Democrats, though at that time in CA, many prominent pols were Southern Democrats as opposed to those sympathetic to ending slavery, so I wasn't sure quite how committed he was to the abolitionist movement). I hope to purchase that book (I first got it at the library), and I highly recommend it.