Free 1858 by Bruce Chadwick Page B

they could defeat the measure. The president had a slogan, “We Must Have Cuba!” Sarcastic Republicans came up with one too, “We Must Have Slavery!” 646
    The president did not understand that this single goal of annexing Cuba would open a Pandora’s box in Congress and that members would see it as an effort to open the door to the annexation of other islands and nations, the type of imperialistic land-grabbing that Congress, controlled by his own party, had turned down repeatedly during Buchanan’s two years in office. In fact, as soon as the proposal was made, one Southern congressman insisted that America had to annex nations “from Alaska to Cape Horn.” A congressman from Vermont joked that if the United States purchased Cuba, it should also purchase Jamaica, Santo Domingo, and the Bahamas. 647
    The proposal to purchase Cuba was debated extensively on the floor of the House of Representatives and at the same time the newspapers offered their opinions, positive in the South and negative in the North. It was soundly defeated. A nonplussed President Buchanan tried to convince Congress to approve it again in each of the years remaining in his term of office. Though he was determined to annex a nation, the Cuban idea never made it to the floor of the House for discussions again.

B UCHANAN’S L EGACY
    Buchanan was alternately criticized and lampooned for his failed efforts at international diplomacy, whether it was sending the navy, with the
Harriet Lane
, threatening to get tough with Paraguay, annex states in Mexico, or buy Cuba. The editor of Washington’s
National Intelligencer
was one of them.
    He wrote at the end of 1858, “We must retrench the extravagant list of magnificent schemes which has received the sanction of the Executive… The great Napoleon himself, with all the resources of an empire at his sole command, never ventured the simultaneous accomplishment of so many daring projects. The acquisition of Cuba…the construction of a Pacific railroad…a Mexican protectorate; international preponderance in Central America, in spite of all the powers of Europe; the submission of distant South American states…the enlargement of the navy; a largely increased standing army…what government on earth could possibly meet all the exigencies of such a flood of innovation?” 648
    There were many others, though, who saw Buchanan’s international swashbuckling as a pathetic cover for his unwillingness to address the great domestic crisis of the age, slavery. The presidents of the United States did not have enormous direct power in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Congress controlled most legislation, but Buchanan, like his predecessors and successors in that era, enjoyed as president enormous powers of persuasion to convince people to do what he thought was best for the nation. Not once did he use those powers.
    In fact, he used the considerable powers of the president to engage in petty disputes, turning members of his own party against him. He could have called on his prestige as president to help candidates get elected, but instead he used it to defeat candidates of his own party, some of them among the best public officials in the nation’s history, such as Stephen Douglas. He was unable to understand the thinking of anyone other than himself and did not realize that his feud with friend and newspaper editor John Forney would turn Forney against him and result in the defeat of numerous congressmen, including House Whip J. Glancy Jones, in the 1858 Pennsylvania elections. He made no effort as president and head of the Democratic Party to work with the party in the 1858 elections, which then turned into a disaster. He spent so much energy reviling William Seward that he spent no time studying other Republicans who might do harm to his party in the coming years, especially the relatively unknown Illinois legislator, Abraham Lincoln. In his efforts to destroy Douglas in Illinois he never considered