Chapter Fifteen - The President Who Watched It Burn and Said, “Not My Job”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The President Who Watched It Burn and Said, “Not My Job”

ALRIGHT.
SO JAMES Buchanan was born in 1791 in Pennsylvania.
He was smart.
Polished.
A lifelong bachelor (the only one),
and a career politician who had done everything before becoming president:

• Congressman
• Senator
• Secretary of State
• Minister to Russia
• Ambassador to the U.K.
• Looked like he came free with a set of encyclopedias

He had the résumé of a legend.
He was known as “The Old Public Functionary.”
(Yeah. That’s real. Sounds like a discontinued appliance.)

But when he finally got elected in 1856, the country was already cracking.

The slavery crisis was full boil.
Southern states were threatening to secede.
“Bleeding Kansas” was still bleeding.
The Supreme Court dropped the Dred Scott decision, saying enslaved people had no rights and that Congress couldn’t ban slavery anywhere.

Buchanan backed it.
Thought it would calm things down.

It did not.

And then?
He did what Buchanan did best:
Nothing.

Like… impressively nothing.

He believed the Constitution didn’t allow the federal government to interfere with slavery in the states.
He said:

“Hey, I don’t like secession, but there’s literally nothing I can do about it.”

South Carolina seceded anyway.
Then Mississippi.
Then Florida.
Then Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas—

And Buchanan?
Just sat there, blinking.

He told Congress:

“This is the next president’s problem.”

And wow—he was right.
Because the next guy was Abraham Lincoln, and he had to walk into literal fire.

Historians almost universally agree:
James Buchanan was one of the worst presidents in U.S. history.

Not because he was evil.
Not because he was corrupt.
But because he was passive at a time that demanded action.

He thought he was keeping the peace.
Instead, he gave everyone permission to tear it all down.

After leaving office, Buchanan wrote a memoir to defend himself, blaming Congress, abolitionists, and the Constitution.
Not himself.
Never himself.

He died in 1868—after the Civil War ended.
By then, the world had moved on.

So here’s to James Buchanan.
The last president of the old union.
The man who froze when history needed fire.

Rest in stillness, James.
You didn’t break the country—
but you sure didn’t save it either.