#15 James Buchanan!
James Buchanan Jr. (/bjuːˈkænən/ byoo-CAN-nən; April 23, 1791 – June 1, 1868) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 15th president of the United States (1857–1861). He previously served as Secretary of State (1845–1849) and represented Pennsylvania in both houses of the U.S. Congress. He was a states’ rights advocate, and minimized the role of the federal government in the nation’s final years of slavery. 21st century historians and critics condemn Buchanan for not addressing the issue of slavery or forestalling the secession of the Southern states over it. Scholars consistently rank him as one of the country’s least successful presidents.
Buchanan was a prominent lawyer in Pennsylvania and won his first election to the state’s House of Representatives as a Federalist. In 1820, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and retained that post for 11 years, aligning with Andrew Jackson‘s Democratic Party. He served as Jackson’s Minister to Russia (1832). He won election in 1834 as a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and also held that position for 11 years. In 1845 he was appointed to serve as President James K. Polk‘s Secretary of State, and in 1853 he was named as President Franklin Pierce‘s Minister to the United Kingdom.
Beginning in 1844, Buchanan became a regular contender for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination. He was finally nominated in 1856, defeating incumbent Franklin Pierce and Senator Stephen A. Douglas at the Democratic National Convention; he benefited from the fact that he had been out of the country, ambassador in London, and thus had not been involved in slavery issues, making friends of some and enemies of others. Buchanan and running mate John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky carried every slave state except Maryland, defeating anti-slavery Republican John C. Frémont and Know-Nothing former president Millard Fillmore to win the 1856 presidential election.
Buchanan supported the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, which said that negroes were not citizens and had no rights. He did what Southern leaders wanted in attempting to engineer Kansas coming into the Union as a slave state. He thereby angered not only the Republicans but also many Northern Democrats. Buchanan honored his pledge to serve only one term, and supported Breckinridge’s unsuccessful candidacy in the 1860 presidential election, which was won instead by Republican Abraham Lincoln. Just weeks after Lincoln was elected as Buchanan’s successor, Southern states began seceding from the U.S., starting the American Civil War.
Buchanan was the first native-born Pennsylvanian to serve as president and would remain the only native-born Pennsylvanian to be elected president until Joe Biden in 2020. Buchanan remains the only native-born Pennsylvanian to have lived in the state while president; Dwight Eisenhower resided in Pennsylvania when he was reelected as president in 1956 but was not born there.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Buchanan
