James Buchanan by Jean H. Baker

Author:Jean H. Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2011-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

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Appeasing the South: The Final Months of the Buchanan Presidency

The last year of Buchanan’s presidency was the worst time in his life. He had hoped after “solving” the crises of his administration in Utah and Kansas that he could turn to his specialty of foreign affairs. In matters of diplomacy, while the American chief executive certainly did not have unlimited power, at least under the Constitution Buchanan interpreted so narrowly, he had more authority than was the case in domestic affairs. Serving as his own secretary of state—for the septuagenarian holder of that title, Lewis Cass, was inattentive—the president intended to check British imperialism in Central America and to rewrite the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. The latter he considered a colossal diplomatic mistake that limited America’s unilateral control over any future canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific. He hoped as well to get the British out of the Western Hemisphere (with Canada a notable exception), or at least to minimize their presence.

Buchanan’s foreign initiatives favored the South, just as his domestic policy did. It seemed obvious to him that the expansion of the United States would proceed southward into Mexico and Central America. Other supporters of manifest destiny had given up the raw American aspirations of the 1840s, but Buchanan stubbornly persisted until the British eventually began the process of ceding the Bay Islands to Honduras and giving sovereignty over the indigenous Mosquito Indians to Nicaragua. The president meant as well to buy Cuba, the island that for nearly thirty years had been his obsession. He continued to argue, as he had in the Ostend Manifesto, that the “Pearl of the Antilles” was essential to American security. And of course he knew that his southern friends eyed it as the Republic’s sixteenth slave state with its four hundred thousand slaves.

Hardly timid and vacillating, as he is sometimes considered, Buchanan went further in his imperial ambitions. He sought an American protectorate over parts of northwest Mexico in Chihuahua and Sonora where he described “hostile and Predatory Indians roam[ing] promiscuously.” Ahead of his time—for twentieth-century presidents relied on similar explanations for their incursions into Latin America—Buchanan pointed to the mistreatment of Americans as well as the security of their investments during a period of civil war in Mexico.

In his 1858 and 1859 messages to Congress, the president displayed his desire to shift the focus to foreign policy. In fact nearly half his comments in both these years centered on the relations of the United States with places formerly as remote as Japan, China, and Alaska. His proposal for Mexico was the most dramatic. He asked for authority to establish military posts across the Arizona border in Mexican territory, and he requested, from a skeptical Congress, the raising of a military force to enter Mexico, according to his 1859 message, “for the purpose of obtaining indemnity for the past and security for the future … I purposely refrain from any suggestion as to whether this force shall consist of regular troops or volunteers or both.”

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