James Buchanan was our nation’s 15^th president, the immediate predecessor to Lincoln. Elected in 1856, Buchanan served in the White House from 1857 to 1861. During his single term, two of the worst things to ever happen to our country took place.

Just days after Buchanan took the oath of office, the Supreme Court issued its infamous decision in the Dred Scott case, which invalidated the Missouri Compromise and ruled that it was unconstitutional for the federal government to regulate slavery in the territories. Even worse, the court ruled that nobody of African descent was or could ever be an American citizen.

Buchanan had hoped (naively? stupidly?) that this court ruling would settle once and for all the controversy over slavery, which had been getting worse and worse especially in Kansas. There is some speculation that Buchanan knew about the Dred Scott decision in advance or even perhaps influenced the court behind the scenes.

It was also on Buchanan’s watch, in the closing weeks of his presidency, that seven of the Southern states finally seceded, led by South Carolina in December 1860 and followed in 1861 by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas, thus precipitating the Civil War. When this happened Buchanan wrote a long letter, published widely in the papers, blaming secession on the abolitionists and the Republican party. Like Fillmore and Pierce before him, Buchanan thought the abolitionists were a bunch of dangerous troublemakers.

When Buchanan first entered politics he was a Federalist, but he soon became a Democrat. He was always trying to get his fellow Democrats in Pennsylvania and around the country to follow his lead, but he was not always successful at that. The Democrats were always fighting amongst themselves.

Before becoming president, Buchanan served in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the U.S. Senate. In those days Senators were elected by state legislatures, not by popular vote. Andrew Jackson, who did not particularly like Buchanan or trust him, sent him on a diplomatic mission to Russia (likely to get him out of the way for a while). He later became Secretary of State under Polk, during which time he was constantly throwing hissy fits when he did not get his way, and often threatening to resign. Pierce sent him to England to negotiate a treaty.

As president Buchanan is credited with opening up trade channels with Asia, and with strengthening ties with Great Britain. He adhered to the Monroe Doctrine. He attempted but failed to purchase Cuba from Spain, and he attempted but failed to take more territory from Mexico. Oh, and there was also the Panic of 1857, a financial crisis that affected not only the United States but also much of the world economy at the time.

A few fun facts James Buchanan:

• Born in a log cabin!
• He was the first president whose inauguration was photographed.
• He was the only president from Pennsylvania.
• He was a lifelong bachelor. Many historians have speculated that he was probably gay. This is based in part on a letter in which he told a friend that he had not been able to find male companionship and that he was prepared to settle for an “old maid” provided she would cook and clean for him and not expect any romantic affection from him in return.
• When he was in Russia he charmed the Czar and Czarina, and when he was in England he made a good impression with Queen Victoria.
• As president Buchanan hosted the Prince of Wales for a state visit, and it was the first time a member of the British Royal Family came to the United States. It marked a turning point in the relationship between the two countries.

Buchanan is often ranked as the very worst, or among the worst, of all the presidents. In his 429-page “President James Buchanan: A Biography,” author Philip S. Klein attempts to rehabilitate Buchanan somewhat, arguing that Buchanan did the best that he could under the circumstances, and that by placating the South he was trying to preserve the Union. Writing in 1961, Klein also makes a pretty good case that a lot of his negative image throughout the decades was the result of an unfair smear campaign carried out in the press by the Republicans during the Civil War. Perhaps, but I am still not going to let Buchanan off that easy. In my view he always seemed to favor the slaveholding South, and he tended to put politics over right and wrong, thus landing on the wrong side of history.

Toward the end of the book, a year before he died, the now former president Buchanan wrote a long public letter in which he argues forcefully that African Americans should not have the right to vote. As my sister Peggy would say, “That guy’s a jackass.”

Our country’s 14^th president had movie-star good looks, but movies hadn’t been invented yet. He had a strong physique, and he was outdoorsy. In college he liked to wrestle. He had a politician’s gift of remembering people’s names and faces. He was a powerful orator. And, importantly, he was born in a log cabin! Back then it really helped if you were born in a log cabin.

When Franklin Pierce was elected president in 1852, he had two principal aims in mind: to hold the union together, and to keep the Democratic Party from splintering. Sadly, he failed at both goals.

The big issue of the day was slavery — more specifically, whether it would be allowed in new states and territories as they joined the union. Under the Missouri Compromise, dating back to 1820, Missouri had been allowed to enter the union as a slave state but slavery was then prohibited everywhere else within the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36-30 parallel (a line which corresponded with Missouri’s southern border). This regime began to unravel, however, with the Compromise of 1850, signed by Pierce’s immediate predecessor, Millard Fillmore, which allowed California in as a free state, and allowed the new Utah and New Mexico territories to decide for themselves whether they wanted to be slave or free. Much of this new land in the West was north of 36-30. Did this therefore invalidate the Missouri Compromise? Many argued at the time that it did.

Under Pierce’s watch came the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), which pretty much killed once and for all the Missouri Compromise. It said that the residents of the new territories could decide the slavery question for themselves under “popular sovereignty.” Settlers from both north and south immediately flooded into Kansas, and things turned violent. The southerners established a pro-slavery territorial government, but settlers from the north accused them of fraud and established their own anti-slavery government. Pierce sided with the pro-slavery Southerners. He always seemed to side with the Southerners.

In his short but informative biography “Franklin Pierce,” part of the American Presidents Series, historian Michael Holt does not blame Pierce for making decisions that steered our country on a path toward civil war, but rather he tries to explain. He argues that Pierce thought at the time that he was acting in the best interests of the country as a whole, and that he was helping prevent southern states from seceding. They were always threatening to secede, those Southerners. At the same time Pierce was also trying to hold the Democratic Party together. The Whig Party had already crumbled, and Holt asserts that Pierce, in his own bizarre logic, thought the Kansas-Nebraska Act would unify the opposition, and therefore in turn help unify the splintering Democrats. It didn’t. And by the end of Pierce’s four years in office, the Democratic Party was so mad at him that they dumped him and gave their party nomination to James Buchanan instead.

Here’s a bit more of what I learned reading about Pierce:

• He was from New Hampshire, and he served in the state legislature there before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and later to the U.S. Senate.
• His father had served in the Revolutionary War, and two older brothers served in the War of 1812. Pierce himself served in the Mexican-American War, but during a key battle he fell off his horse and all the troops marched on to victory ahead of him.
• Pierce’s vice president, William R. King, who was from Alabama and had been James Buchanan’s roommate (or maybe Buchanan’s “roommate”?), died a month into his term. King was not replaced.
• Pierce’s entire cabinet served his full presidential term, and it was the only time in U.S. history that no cabinet members were replaced during an entire presidential term.
• As president, Pierce signed the Gadsden Purchase, acquiring from Mexico approximately 30,000 square miles of what is today large parts of southern Arizona and New Mexico.
• He attempted but failed to purchase Cuba from Spain.
• Pierce and his wife, Jane Means Appleton Pierce, had three sons, and they all died in childhood. Tragically, the third son died, at age 11, after Pierce’s election but before his inauguration, in a ghastly train accident witnessed by both parents.
• Jane Pierce was often ill, and she detested politics and rarely made public appearances.
• There is no evidence of any drunkenness when Pierce was serving as president, but before and after his presidency he was known to be a heavy drinker, and he probably died of alcoholism.
• He had a lifelong friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne. They had met in college. The former president and the great American author were on a trip together when Hawthorne died in an adjoining room at an inn, in 1864. Pierce died in 1869.

Speaking of authors, Harriet Beecher Stowe published her novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in book form in 1852, the year Pierce was elected. It became the second best selling book of the 19^th century, after the Bible. Today “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is sometimes blamed for having perpetrated negative stereotypes about African-Americans, but back in the 1800s it raised consciousness of countless Americans about the horrors and injustices of slavery. I wonder if Pierce read it at the time. I suspect not.

Reflecting a bit more on Pierce and other politicians of his day, including Presidents Millard Fillmore before him and James Buchanan after him, I am saddened. They seemed too focused on the day-to-day politics and did not seem comprehend the larger promise of our country, which according to our founding documents said freedom for all. George Washington saw the big picture. So did John Quincy Adams. Lincoln will too, eventually.

There were two major political parties through most of the 1840s and early 1850s — the Whigs and the Democrats. Both the Whigs and the Democrats each had northern and southern factions, and their leaders fought amongst themselves. The infighting was much worse in Whig party. Millard Fillmore, our nation’s 13^th president, was a Whig. He was the fourth and final Whig to be president. He had been elected as Zachary Taylor’s vice president and became president in 1850, upon the death of Taylor. In 1852 the Whigs held their national convention in Baltimore but passed over Fillmore for the nomination, picking instead General Winfield Scott, who would go on to lose to Fillmore’s successor, Democrat Franklin Pierce. As I mentioned the infighting among the Whigs was awful, and the party essentially disintegrated after the election of 1852.

Four years later Fillmore ran for president again, unsuccessfully — this time as the candidate of the American party, also known as the “Know Nothing Party.” This party was made up of anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant bigots, but Fillmore did not openly express a bigoted ideology when he campaigned.

As president, Fillmore’s most consequential action was his signing into law the Compromise of 1850, which allowed California to enter the union as a free state. The southern states hated this because they wanted to preserve and expand slavery. To mollify the South, the compromise also included the Fugitive Slave Act, which required federal officials and state governments to participate in the forced deportation of those who had escaped to freedom, back to the south. Believing this to be constitutional and his duty to preserve the union, Fillmore enforced the Fugitive Slave Act.

Fillmore never took a strong stand for or against slavery, but before he left office he wrote a very bizarre and ridiculous plan to deport all the enslaved people and replace them with laborers from Asia. He had planned to deliver this idea as a farewell address to Congress, but his Cabinet talked him out of it.

The Compromise of 1850 probably postponed the civil war for a few extra years, but it came at a price. Yet while I am troubled by Fillmore’s acquiescence to the slave south, I do think he is under-appreciated as a chief executive. He successfully dealt with a number of foreign policy challenges. And he advocated policies that favored business interests, trade and shipping.

Here’s a bit more of what I learned about Millard Fillmore:

• He did not carry grudges or take things personally. He was not spiteful or vindictive and did not seek revenge against his political opponents.
• He used patronage appointments sparingly.
• His first job in politics was New York State Assemblyman, representing the Anti-Masonic Party (yes, that really was a thing!)
• He also served in the House of Representatives and was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, working on the issue of tariffs.
• Was the first to be elected Comptroller of New York State.
• From Buffalo. His parents were poor tenant farmers.
• Millard was his mother’s maiden name.
• He loved books.
• For decades he clashed with Thurlow Weed, a powerful newspaper editor from upstate New York who pulled many strings behind the scenes in the Whig party. On numerous occasions, Fillmore attempted to be magnanimous but Weed always ultimately stabbed Fillmore in the back.
• As I mentioned Fillmore became president when Zachary Taylor died in office. The same thing happened with the previous two Whig presidents, when William Henry Harrison died and John Tyler became president. And neither Tyler nor Fillmore received the Whig Party nomination in the following election. Weird.
• Sadly, Fillmore’s wife caught pneumonia at Pierce’s inauguration, and the former first lady died soon after. Many years later the widower former president remarried.
• Before becoming a lawyer and entering politics, Fillmore worked as a schoolteacher. He helped Buffalo establish a public school system.
• He also served as a volunteer firefighter and advocated for local fire departments.

Today Millard Fillmore is largely dismissed as a forgotten president, and he is often ranked among the worst in presidential lists and surveys. He is even vilified by many historians. Biographer Robert J. Rayback, in “Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President,” presents a more nuanced view, putting Fillmore’s long life in public service in context with the times.

What I liked about this book is that it explained much of the political turmoil that Fillmore faced. Yet I also found this book to be long and tedious. It had bad punctuation throughout, and I found numerous typographical errors. (James K. Polk was spelled “Folk” at least four times. And this is the only book I have ever read in which Chapter 25 comes between Chapters 23 and 24. Where’s a good proofreader when you need one?)

Despite these flaws, I still consider this book to be a serious biography of an important American of his times. And because the subject’s career spanned so many key decades when the Whigs were a real force in American life, Rayback’s Fillmore biography also functions in many ways as a history of the Whig Party. I am glad I took the time to read this.

Zachary Taylor was the 12^th President of the United States. He was the fourth who had served as a general, the third to belong to the Whig Party, and he was the second to die in office. It was from cholera, after he drank some suspicious milk and ate a bowl of cherries. Ya gotta be more careful in the hot summer months in Washington, DC, a city that had open sewers at the time.

The son of a Revolutionary War veteran, Zachary Taylor was born and raised in Kentucky, then later moved to Louisiana. He owned plantations, and he owned slaves. Yet despite his being from the South, he actually sided more with the North when disputes arose over whether or not the new states and territories in the West would be slave or free. Taylor was a unionist, and he vigorously opposed anyone from the Soutth who even so much as hinted at secession. Good for him.

Before becoming president, Taylor had a long career in the Army. He fought in the War of 1812 and in the Mexican-American War, and he also fought the Indians in the Black Hawk War in Illinois and the Second Seminole War in Florida. He was not considered a great general, but he did become famous as one. His nickname was “Old Rough and Ready.” This helped get him elected in 1848. He ran against Lewis Cass, a Democrat from Michigan. He had not been elected to anything before becoming president, and he did not have very good political skills. His presidency lasted only a year and change.

Some fun facts about Zachary Taylor:

• One of his daughters married Jefferson Davis, who would go on to become president of the Confederacy! (But she died three months after the marriage, of malaria.)
• He was an admirer of Thomas Jefferson.
• He was often disheveled and wore sloppy clothes, even as a general.
• He had a bad temper, and he carried personal grudges.
• Not very educated or worldly.
• He never got into the habit of voting.
• It’s not in the book, but many had speculated that Taylor might have been poisoned! His body was exhumed in 1991, but no traces of arsenic were found.

I found “Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest” by K. Jack Bauer to be a bit tedious. It was indeed a well-researched book, with plenty of footnotes and maps, and I found the analysis was solid and thoughtful. Yet for some reason I just did not enjoy this, the way I have eagerly devoured so many other presidential biographies I have been reading. (In my opinion the choice of a cover picture is atrocious, the worst I have ever seen.) And unfortunately, despite the author’s careful gathering of all the available facts, I felt I just could not really figure Taylor out by reading this. But I don’t think the author could either, as he summed it up well with the last line of his book: “He was and remains an enigma.”

It was in 1845, during the single term of James K. Polk, our nation’s 11th president, that someone coined the term Manifest Destiny — the concept that our country would one day go all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

The original 13 states were all on the Eastern Seaboard, but it did not take long for Americans to begin moving west, with new states and territories stretching all the way to the Mississippi River Valley. At the dawn of the 19^th Century, Jefferson doubled the size of our country with the Louisiana Purchase. But it was Polk, four decades later, who would pave the way for us to have what would become a coast-to-coast country. If you’ve ever been to Disneyland, or had a beverage from Starbucks, or if you’ve ever seen a Hollywood movie, you can thank James K. Polk. He used every tool at his disposal. He encouraged pioneers to pack up everything and trek across the Rocky Mountains in covered wagons. He sent the military to the frontier with vague or misleading instructions. If the generals went too far and grabbed too much territory, he wasn’t going to stop them. He got the British to the bargaining table over the jointly occupied Oregon Territory, securing what would eventually become the states of Idaho, Oregon and Washington.

But the grand prize was Alta California (upper California) and to get this, as well as the vast New Mexico Territory, he would play hardball with Mexico, eventually taking us to war. The Mexicans crossed the Rio Grande and attacked General Zachary Taylor’s troops, which gave Polk the opening he needed. Blood had been “spilled on American soil,” giving us an excuse to declare war, invade and occupy Mexico City. In the last days of the Tyler presidency, Texas had been added to the union as a state, but nobody at the time could agree on what the actual boundaries were. Polk took care of all that.

On the Fourth of July in 1848, on the very day that he attended a ceremony in which the cornerstone for the Washington Monument was laid, Polk held in his hands the final signed copy of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the war. Mexico got $15.8 million, and we got approximately one million square miles, what would become the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Cue the Village People song “Go West.”

At this point I should also mention slavery. All this acquisition of new territory was controversial at the time. Many in the north did not want us to acquire more territory because they feared this would lead to more slave states and would upset the balance of power in Congress. Many in the south were all for it though, because, yay slavery. Polk himself did not take a strong stand one way or the other on slavery, but, like many other presidents of the era both good and bad, he himself was a slave owner. Just a decade later, slavery would split our country in a tragic war, but that would be a fight for future presidents.

Trained as a lawyer, James Knox Polk got his start in politics as a clerk for the Tennessee state senate, before getting elected to the Tennessee state house of representatives. He then served seven terms in the in the U.S. House of Representatives. He became chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and later became Speaker of the House. Leaving Washington with hopes of returning someday as president, Polk was elected governor of Tennessee but then lost his re-election bid and lost again when he ran a third time. Having just suffered two humiliating losses at the ballot box, he was a bit of a surprise candidate in the election of 1844 when he got the Democratic Party nomination, facing the Whig candidate, Henry Clay. He promised he would serve just one term, and he kept that promise. Sadly, he died in June 1849, just three months after leaving office.

Like all Democrats in that era, he did not believe the federal government had any business spending money on “internal improvements” and he vetoed various infrastructure bills, including one that would have funded harbors on the Great Lakes.

He had a hard working, loyal cabinet, with the exception of his Secretary of State, James Buchanan, who was a vacillating, scheming troublemaker.

Some fun facts about Polk:

• Born in a log cabin!
• He was a workaholic and a micromanager who rarely took vacations and did not allow his cabinet secretaries to stray far from the capital.
• He was a disciple of Andrew Jackson.
• Married to Sarah. They had no children, possibly because he might have become sterile after undergoing a gruesome surgery for urinary stones when he was young.
• At the time he was elected in 1844, he was in his late 40s and was the youngest to have ever been elected president.
• To this day, he is the only Speaker of the House to later become president.

There are many biographies of Polk to choose from. I read “Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America” by Walker R. Borneman. It was a page-turner. Complete with helpful maps and high-quality portraits of key players, I found it engrossing and I could not put it down. The author makes a strong case that Polk set himself above many other presidents by listing four very specific policy goals at the outset of his presidency, accomplishing them, and then stepping aside. The author also points out that Polk, in deciding to go to war with Mexico and getting Congress to rubber stamp it, wrested the war-making decision, rightly or wrongly, away from the legislative and to the executive branch.

Like Barbra Streisand and Pete Townsend, the 10^th President had a large, prominent nose.

He fathered 15 children with two different wives. His first wife, Letitia Tyler, popped out eight children and then died, making Tyler a widower. She was the first first lady to die while her husband was in office.

While he was still president, at age 53, John Tyler married again, to a wealthy 24-year-old named Julia Gardiner. Yes, she was just 24! They remained happily married long after his presidency and she popped out seven children. Julia Gardiner Tyler came from a rich family and was a society girl. She hired a publicist who named her “The Lovely Lady Presidentress” in newspaper articles, a title that did not stick.

Tyler survived a ghastly cannon fire disaster aboard a brand new Navy battleship in which his Secretary of State, his Secretary of the Navy, and several other dignitaries were killed. Julia’s father was also killed, and Tyler carried her off the boat in his arms after she fainted.

Tyler was elected vice president under William Henry Harrison (aka Old Tippecanoe; their campaign slogan had been “Tippecanoe and Tyler too”) but Harrison died after a month in office. A president had never died in office before, and the line of succession under the constitution wasn’t considered entirely clear on what to do. Tyler fought those who wanted to refer to him as “acting president” and took control of the federal government and the Cabinet, and took the presidential oath of office, setting a precedent for the smooth and orderly transition of power.

As president, Tyler successfully negotiated a dispute with Great Britain over the border between Maine and Canada. He opened up trade channels with China. He strengthened the Navy. He fought hard to annex Texas, which had recently declared independence from Mexico, and he finally accomplished that just days before he left office. He clashed with the powerful Senator Henry Clay.

Tyler issued tons of vetoes, and that caused many in Congress to hate him. He was burned in effigy, there was a move to impeach him, and his political opponents labeled him “His Accidency.” In an act of defiance, his entire Cabinet save one resigned on the same day. He had been elected on the Whig ticket, but when he did not go along with what the party wanted the Whigs expelled him. In the election of 1844 he tried running under his own party but it was futile. He later dropped out of the race and threw his support to Polk, largely to prevent Clay, whom he loathed, from getting elected.

Earlier in his career, Tyler had served in the Virginia state legislature and as governor of Virginia, and he served in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.

John Tyler, the nation’s 10^th president, was not the first nor would he be the last to own slaves. Like many of the late 18^th and early 19^th Century presidents, Tyler was born into a slave society, an economy that was dependent upon forced, unpaid labor. Most of our early presidents knew that this system was unsustainable, and most also realized that the divisions between north and south over the institution would ultimately lead to civil war. Tyler, sadly, toward the end of his life, betrayed the constitution he had sworn to uphold and died on the wrong side of history. Less than two years before his death, the aged former president participated in a peace commission to avert conflict, but he ultimately sided with Virginia in seceding from the union. He was then elected to the House of Representatives — for the Confederacy. This was long after he had left the White House and just months before he died. His coffin was draped in the Confederate flag. In my view he died a traitor to the United States, which taints his what he accomplished as president. This is sad, because his accomplishments were not minor.

As presidential biographies go, I found Gary May’s “John Tyler,” part of the American Presidents Series, to be adequate. It was a short book about someone who is today a mostly forgotten president, but I sure learned a lot.