{"prompt": "Here are the relevant Wikipedia articles:\nThe president of the United States (POTUS) is the head of state and head of government of the United States of America. The president directs the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces.\nThe power of the presidency has grown substantially since the first president, George Washington, took office in 1789. While presidential power has ebbed and flowed over time, the presidency has played an increasingly significant role in American political life since the beginning of the 20th century, carrying over into the 21st century with notable expansions during the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and George W. Bush. In modern times, the president is one of the world's most powerful political figures and the leader of the world's only remaining superpower. As the leader of the nation with the largest economy by nominal GDP, the president possesses significant domestic and international hard and soft power. For much of the 20th century, especially during the Cold War, the U.S. president was often called \"the leader of the free world\".\nArticle II of the Constitution establishes the executive branch of the federal government and vests executive power in the president. The power includes the execution and enforcement of federal law and the responsibility to appoint federal executive, diplomatic, regulatory, and judicial officers.  Based on constitutional provisions empowering the president to appoint and receive ambassadors and conclude treaties with foreign powers, and on subsequent laws enacted by Congress, the modern presidency has primary responsibility for conducting U.S. foreign policy. The role includes responsibility for directing the world's most expensive military, which has the second-largest nuclear arsenal.\nThe president also plays a leading role in federal legislation and domestic policymaking. As part of the system of separation of powers, Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution gives the president the power to sign or veto federal legislation. Since modern presidents are typically viewed as leaders of their political parties, major policymaking is significantly shaped by the outcome of presidential elections, with presidents taking an active role in promoting their policy priorities to members of Congress who are often electorally dependent on the president. In recent decades, presidents have also made increasing use of executive orders, agency regulations, and judicial appointments to shape domestic policy.\nThe president is elected indirectly through the Electoral College to a four-year term, along with the vice president. Under the Twenty-second Amendment, ratified in 1951, no person who has been elected to two presidential terms may be elected to a third. In addition, nine vice presidents have become president by virtue of a president's intra-term death or resignation. In all, 45 individuals have served 46 presidencies spanning 58 four-year terms. Joe Biden is the 46th and current president, having assumed office on January 20, 2021.\n\nHistory and development\nOrigins\nDuring the American Revolutionary War, the Thirteen Colonies, represented by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, declared themselves to be independent sovereign states and no longer under British rule. The affirmation was made in the Declaration of Independence, which was written predominantly by Thomas Jefferson and adopted unanimously on July 4, 1776, by the Second Continental Congress. Recognizing the necessity of closely coordinating their efforts against the British, the Continental Congress simultaneously began the process of drafting a constitution that would bind the states together. There were long debates on a number of issues, including representation and voting, and the exact powers to be given the central government. Congress finished work on the Articles of Confederation to establish a perpetual union between the states in November 1777 and sent it to the states for ratification.\nUnder the Articles, which took effect on March 1, 1781, the Congress of the Confederation was a central political authority without any legislative power. It could make its own resolutions, determinations, and regulations, but not any laws, and could not impose any taxes or enforce local commercial regulations upon its citizens. This institutional design reflected how Americans believed the deposed British system of Crown and Parliament ought to have functioned with respect to the royal dominion: a superintending body for matters that concerned the entire empire. The states were out from under any monarchy and assigned some formerly royal prerogatives (e.g., making war, receiving ambassadors, etc.) to Congress; the remaining prerogatives were lodged within their own respective state governments. The members of Congress elected a president of the United States in Congress Assembled to preside over its deliberation as a neutral discussion moderator. Unrelated to and quite dissimilar from the later office of president of the United States, it was a largely ceremonial position without much influence.\nIn 1783, the Treaty of Paris secured independence for each of the former colonies. With peace at hand, the states each turned toward their own internal affairs. By 1786, Americans found their continental borders besieged and weak and their respective economies in crises as neighboring states agitated trade rivalries with one another. They witnessed their hard currency pouring into foreign markets to pay for imports, their Mediterranean commerce preyed upon by North African pirates, and their foreign-financed Revolutionary War debts unpaid and accruing interest. Civil and political unrest loomed.  Events such as the Newburgh Conspiracy and Shays' Rebellion demonstrated that the Articles of Confederation were not working.\nFollowing the successful resolution of commercial and fishing disputes between Virginia and Maryland at the Mount Vernon Conference in 1785, Virginia called for a trade conference between all the states, set for September 1786 in Annapolis, Maryland, with an aim toward resolving further-reaching interstate commercial antagonisms. When the convention failed for lack of attendance due to suspicions among most of the other states, Alexander Hamilton of New York led the Annapolis delegates in a call for a convention to offer revisions to the Articles, to be held the next spring in Philadelphia. Prospects for the next convention appeared bleak until James Madison and Edmund Randolph succeeded in securing George Washington's attendance to Philadelphia as a delegate for Virginia.\nWhen the Constitutional Convention convened in May 1787, the 12 state delegations in attendance (Rhode Island did not send delegates) brought with them an accumulated experience over a diverse set of institutional arrangements between legislative and executive branches from within their respective state governments. Most states maintained a weak executive without veto or appointment powers, elected annually by the legislature to a single term only, sharing power with an executive council, and countered by a strong legislature. New York offered the greatest exception, having a strong, unitary governor with veto and appointment power elected to a three-year term, and eligible for reelection to an indefinite number of terms thereafter. It was through the closed-door negotiations at Philadelphia that the presidency framed in the U.S. Constitution emerged.\n\n1789–1933\nAs the nation's first president, George Washington established many norms that would come to define the office. His decision to retire after two terms helped address fears that the nation would devolve into monarchy, and established a precedent that would not be broken until 1940 and would eventually be made permanent by the Twenty-Second Amendment. By the end of his presidency, political parties had developed, with John Adams defeating Thomas Jefferson in 1796, the first truly contested presidential election.  After Jefferson defeated Adams in 1800, he and his fellow Virginians James Madison and James Monroe would each serve two terms, eventually dominating the nation's politics during the Era of Good Feelings until Adams' son John Quincy Adams won election in 1824 after the Democratic-Republican Party split.\nThe election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 was a significant milestone, as Jackson was not part of the Virginia and Massachusetts elite that had held the presidency for its first 40 years. Jacksonian democracy sought to strengthen the presidency at the expense of Congress, while broadening public participation as the nation rapidly expanded westward. However, his successor, Martin Van Buren, became unpopular after the Panic of 1837, and the death of William Henry Harrison and subsequent poor relations between John Tyler and Congress led to further weakening of the office. Including Van Buren, in the 24 years between 1837 and 1861, six presidential terms would be filled by eight different men, with none serving two terms. The Senate played an important role during this period, with the Great Triumvirate of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun playing key roles in shaping national policy in the 1830s and 1840s until debates over slavery began pulling the nation apart in the 1850s.\nAbraham Lincoln's leadership during the Civil War has led historians to regard him as one of the nation's greatest presidents. The circumstances of the war and Republican domination of Congress made the office very powerful, and Lincoln's re-election in 1864 was the first time a president had been re-elected since Jackson in 1832. After Lincoln's assassination, his successor Andrew Johnson lost all political support and was nearly removed from office, with Congress remaining powerful during the two-term presidency of Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant. After the end of Reconstruction, Grover Cleveland would eventually become the first Democratic president elected since before the war, running in three consecutive elections (1884, 1888, 1892) and winning twice. In 1900, William McKinley became the first incumbent to win re-election since Grant in 1872.\nAfter McKinley's assassination by Leon Czolgosz in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became a dominant figure in American politics. Historians believe Roosevelt permanently changed the political system by strengthening the presidency, with some key accomplishments including breaking up trusts, conservationism, labor reforms, making personal character as important as the issues, and hand-picking his successor, William Howard Taft. The following decade, Woodrow Wilson led the nation to victory during World War I, although Wilson's proposal for the League of Nations was rejected by the Senate.  Warren Harding, while popular in office, would see his legacy tarnished by scandals, especially Teapot Dome, and Herbert Hoover quickly became very unpopular after failing to alleviate the Great Depression.\n\nImperial presidency\nThe ascendancy of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 led further toward what historians now describe as the Imperial presidency. Backed by enormous Democratic majorities in Congress and public support for major change, Roosevelt's New Deal dramatically increased the size and scope of the federal government, including more executive agencies.: 211–12  The traditionally small presidential staff was greatly expanded, with the Executive Office of the President being created in 1939, none of whom require Senate confirmation.: 229–231  Roosevelt's unprecedented re-election to a third and fourth term, the victory of the United States in World War II, and the nation's growing economy all helped established the office as a position of global leadership.: 269  His successors, Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, each served two terms as the Cold War led the presidency to be viewed as the \"leader of the free world\", while John F. Kennedy was a youthful and popular leader who benefited from the rise of television in the 1960s.\nAfter Lyndon B. Johnson lost popular support due to the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon's presidency collapsed in the Watergate scandal, Congress enacted a series of reforms intended to reassert itself. These included the War Powers Resolution, enacted over Nixon's veto in 1973, and the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 that sought to strengthen congressional fiscal powers. By 1976, Gerald Ford conceded that \"the historic pendulum\" had swung toward Congress, raising the possibility of a \"disruptive\" erosion of his ability to govern. Ford failed to win election to a full term and his successor, Jimmy Carter, failed to win re-election.  Ronald Reagan, who had been an actor before beginning his political career, used his talent as a communicator to help reshape the American agenda away from New Deal policies toward more conservative ideology.\nWith the Cold War ending and the United States becoming the world's undisputed leading power, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama each served two terms as president. Meanwhile, Congress and the nation gradually became more politically polarized, especially following the 1994 mid-term elections that saw Republicans control the House for the first time in 40 years, and the rise of routine filibusters in the Senate in recent decades. Recent presidents have thus increasingly focused on executive orders, agency regulations, and judicial appointments to implement major policies, at the expense of legislation and congressional power. Presidential elections in the 21st century have reflected this continuing polarization, with no candidate except Obama in 2008 winning by more than five percent of the popular vote and two, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, winning in the Electoral College while losing the popular vote.\n\nCritics of presidency's evolution\nThe nation's Founding Fathers expected the Congress, which was the first branch of government described in the Constitution, to be the dominant branch of government; however, they did not expect a strong executive department. However, presidential power has shifted over time, which has resulted in claims that the modern presidency has become too powerful, unchecked, unbalanced, and \"monarchist\" in nature. In 2008 professor Dana D. Nelson expressed belief that presidents over the previous thirty years worked towards \"undivided presidential control of the executive branch and its agencies\". She criticized proponents of the unitary executive theory for expanding \"the many existing uncheckable executive powers—such as executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements—that already allow presidents to enact a good deal of foreign and domestic policy without aid, interference or consent from Congress\". Bill Wilson, board member of Americans for Limited Government, opined that the expanded presidency was \"the greatest threat ever to individual freedom and democratic rule\".\n\nLegislative powers\nArticle I, Section 1 of the Constitution vests all lawmaking power in Congress's hands, and Article 1, Section 6, Clause 2 prevents the president (and all other executive branch officers) from simultaneously being a member of Congress. Nevertheless, the modern presidency exerts significant power over legislation, both due to constitutional provisions and historical developments over time.\n\nSigning and vetoing bills\nThe president's most significant legislative power derives from the Presentment Clause, which gives the president the power to veto any bill passed by Congress. While Congress can override a presidential veto, it requires a two-thirds vote of both houses, which is usually very difficult to achieve except for widely supported bipartisan legislation. The framers of the Constitution feared that Congress would seek to increase its power and enable a \"tyranny of the majority\", so giving the indirectly elected president a veto was viewed as an important check on the legislative power. While George Washington believed the veto should only be used in cases where a bill was unconstitutional, it is now routinely used in cases where presidents have policy disagreements with a bill.  The veto – or threat of a veto – has thus evolved to make the modern presidency a central part of the American legislative process.\nSpecifically, under the Presentment Clause, once a bill has been presented by Congress, the president has three options:\n\nSign the legislation within ten days, excluding Sundays, the bill becomes law.\nVeto the legislation within the above timeframe and return it to the house of Congress from which it originated, expressing any objections, the bill does not become law, unless both houses of Congress vote to override the veto by a two-thirds vote.\nTake no action on the legislation within the above timeframe—the bill becomes law, as if the president had signed it, unless Congress is adjourned at the time, in which case it does not become law, which is known as a pocket veto.\nIn 1996, Congress attempted to enhance the president's veto power with the Line Item Veto Act. The legislation empowered the president to sign any spending bill into law while simultaneously striking certain spending items within the bill, particularly any new spending, any amount of discretionary spending, or any new limited tax benefit. Congress could then repass that particular item. If the president then vetoed the new legislation, Congress could override the veto by its ordinary means, a two-thirds vote in both houses. In Clinton v. City of New York, 524 U.S. 417 (1998), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such a legislative alteration of the veto power to be unconstitutional.\n\nSetting the agenda\nFor most of American history, candidates for president have sought election on the basis of a promised legislative agenda. Article II, Section 3, Clause 2 requires the president to recommend such measures to Congress which the president deems \"necessary and expedient\". This is done through the constitutionally-based State of the Union address, which usually outlines the president's legislative proposals for the coming year, and through other formal and informal communications with Congress.\nThe president can be involved in crafting legislation by suggesting, requesting, or even insisting that Congress enact laws that the president believes are needed. Additionally, the president can attempt to shape legislation during the legislative process by exerting influence on individual members of Congress. Presidents possess this power because the Constitution is silent about who can write legislation, but the power is limited because only members of Congress can introduce legislation.\nThe president or other officials of the executive branch may draft legislation and then ask senators or representatives to introduce these drafts into Congress. Additionally, the president may attempt to have Congress alter proposed legislation by threatening to veto that legislation unless requested changes are made.\n\nPromulgating regulations\nMany laws enacted by Congress do not address every possible detail, and either explicitly or implicitly delegate powers of implementation to an appropriate federal agency. As the head of the executive branch, presidents control a vast array of agencies that can issue regulations with little oversight from Congress.\nIn the 20th century, critics charged that too many legislative and budgetary powers that should have belonged to Congress had slid into the hands of presidents. One critic charged that presidents could appoint a \"virtual army of 'czars'—each wholly unaccountable to Congress yet tasked with spearheading major policy efforts for the White House\". Presidents have been criticized for making signing statements when signing congressional legislation about how they understand a bill or plan to execute it. This practice has been criticized by the American Bar Association as unconstitutional. Conservative commentator George Will wrote of an \"increasingly swollen executive branch\" and \"the eclipse of Congress\".\n\nConvening and adjourning Congress\nTo allow the government to act quickly in case of a major domestic or international crisis arising when Congress is not in session, the president is empowered by Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution to call a special session of one or both houses of Congress. Since John Adams first did so in 1797, the president has called the full Congress to convene for a special session on 27 occasions. Harry S. Truman was the most recent to do so in July 1948, known as the Turnip Day Session. In addition, prior to ratification of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933, which brought forward the date on which Congress convenes from December to January, newly inaugurated presidents would routinely call the Senate to meet to confirm nominations or ratify treaties. In practice, the power has fallen into disuse in the modern era as Congress now formally remains in session year-round, convening pro forma sessions every three days even when ostensibly in recess. Correspondingly, the president is authorized to adjourn Congress if the House and Senate cannot agree on the time of adjournment; no president has ever had to exercise this power.\n\nExecutive powers\nThe president is head of the executive branch of the federal government and is constitutionally obligated to \"take care that the laws be faithfully executed\". The executive branch has over four million employees, including the military.\n\nAdministrative powers\nPresidents make political appointments. An incoming president may make up to 4,000 upon taking office, 1200 of which must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Ambassadors, members of the Cabinet, and various officers, are among the positions filled by presidential appointment with Senate confirmation.\nThe power of a president to fire executive officials has long been a contentious political issue. Generally, a president may remove executive officials at will. However, Congress can curtail and constrain a president's authority to fire commissioners of independent regulatory agencies and certain inferior executive officers by statute.\nTo manage the growing federal bureaucracy, presidents have gradually surrounded themselves with many layers of staff, who were eventually organized into the Executive Office of the President of the United States. Within the Executive Office, the president's innermost layer of aides, and their assistants, are located in the White House Office.\nThe president also possesses the power to manage operations of the federal government by issuing various types of directives, such as presidential proclamation and executive orders. When the president is lawfully exercising one of the constitutionally conferred presidential responsibilities, the scope of this power is broad. Even so, these directives are subject to judicial review by U.S. federal courts, which can find them to be unconstitutional. Congress can overturn an executive order through legislation.\n\nForeign affairs\nArticle II, Section 3, Clause 4 requires the president to \"receive Ambassadors.\" This clause, known as the Reception Clause, has been interpreted to imply that the president possesses broad power over matters of foreign policy, and to provide support for the president's exclusive authority to grant recognition to a foreign government. The Constitution also empowers the president to appoint United States ambassadors, and to propose and chiefly negotiate agreements between the United States and other countries. Such agreements, upon receiving the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate (by a two-thirds majority vote), become binding with the force of federal law.\nWhile foreign affairs has always been a significant element of presidential responsibilities, advances in technology since the Constitution's adoption have increased presidential power. Where formerly ambassadors were vested with significant power to independently negotiate on behalf of the United States, presidents now routinely meet directly with leaders of foreign countries.\n\nCommander-in-chief\nOne of the most important of executive powers is the president's role as commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces. The power to declare war is constitutionally vested in Congress, but the president has ultimate responsibility for the direction and disposition of the military. The exact degree of authority that the Constitution grants to the president as commander-in-chief has been the subject of much debate throughout history, with Congress at various times granting the president wide authority and at others attempting to restrict that authority. The framers of the Constitution took care to limit the president's powers regarding the military; Alexander Hamilton explained this in Federalist No. 69:The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. ... It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces ... while that [the power] of the British king extends to the DECLARING of war and to the RAISING and REGULATING of fleets and armies, all [of] which ... would appertain to the legislature. [Emphasis in the original.]\nIn the modern era, pursuant to the War Powers Resolution, Congress must authorize any troop deployments longer than 60 days, although that process relies on triggering mechanisms that have never been employed, rendering it ineffectual. Additionally, Congress provides a check to presidential military power through its control over military spending and regulation. Presidents have historically initiated the process for going to war, but critics have charged that there have been several conflicts in which presidents did not get official declarations, including Theodore Roosevelt's military move into Panama in 1903, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the invasions of Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989.\nThe amount of military detail handled personally by the president in wartime has varied greatly. George Washington, the first U.S. president, firmly established military subordination under civilian authority. In 1794, Washington used his constitutional powers to assemble 12,000 militia to quell the Whiskey Rebellion, a conflict in Western Pennsylvania involving armed farmers and distillers who refused to pay an excise tax on spirits. According to historian Joseph Ellis, this was the \"first and only time a sitting American president led troops in the field\", though James Madison briefly took control of artillery units in defense of Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812. Abraham Lincoln was deeply involved in overall strategy and in day-to-day operations during the American Civil War, 1861–1865; historians have given Lincoln high praise for his strategic sense and his ability to select and encourage commanders such as Ulysses S. Grant.\nThe present-day operational command of the Armed Forces is delegated to the Department of Defense and is normally exercised through the secretary of defense. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combatant Commands assist with the operation as outlined in the presidentially approved Unified Command Plan (UCP).\n\nJuridical powers and privileges\nThe president has the power to nominate federal judges, including members of the United States courts of appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States. However, these nominations require Senate confirmation before they may take office. Securing Senate approval can provide a major obstacle for presidents who wish to orient the federal judiciary toward a particular ideological stance. When nominating judges to U.S. district courts, presidents often respect the long-standing tradition of senatorial courtesy. Presidents may also grant pardons and reprieves. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon a month after taking office. Presidents often grant pardons shortly before leaving office, like when Bill Clinton pardoned Patty Hearst on his last day in office; this is often controversial.\nTwo doctrines concerning executive power have developed that enable the president to exercise executive power with a degree of autonomy. The first is executive privilege, which allows the president to withhold from disclosure any communications made directly to the president in the performance of executive duties. George Washington first claimed the privilege when Congress requested to see Chief Justice John Jay's notes from an unpopular treaty negotiation with Great Britain. While not enshrined in the Constitution or any other law, Washington's action created the precedent for the privilege. When Nixon tried to use executive privilege as a reason for not turning over subpoenaed evidence to Congress during the Watergate scandal, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974), that executive privilege did not apply in cases where a president was attempting to avoid criminal prosecution. When Bill Clinton attempted to use executive privilege regarding the Lewinsky scandal, the Supreme Court ruled in Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681 (1997), that the privilege also could not be used in civil suits. These cases established the legal precedent that executive privilege is valid, although the exact extent of the privilege has yet to be clearly defined. Additionally, federal courts have allowed this privilege to radiate outward and protect other executive branch employees but have weakened that protection for those executive branch communications that do not involve the president.\nThe state secrets privilege allows the president and the executive branch to withhold information or documents from discovery in legal proceedings if such release would harm national security. Precedent for the privilege arose early in the 19th century when Thomas Jefferson refused to release military documents in the treason trial of Aaron Burr and again in Totten v. United States 92 U.S. 105 (1876), when the Supreme Court dismissed a case brought by a former Union spy. However, the privilege was not formally recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court until United States v. Reynolds 345 U.S. 1 (1953), where it was held to be a common law evidentiary privilege. Before the September 11 attacks, use of the privilege had been rare, but increasing in frequency. Since 2001, the government has asserted the privilege in more cases and at earlier stages of the litigation, thus in some instances causing dismissal of the suits before reaching the merits of the claims, as in the Ninth Circuit's ruling in Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. Critics of the privilege claim its use has become a tool for the government to cover up illegal or embarrassing government actions.\nThe degree to which the president personally has absolute immunity from court cases is contested and has been the subject of several Supreme Court decisions. Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982) dismissed a civil lawsuit against by-then former president Richard Nixon based on his official actions. Clinton v. Jones (1997) decided that a president has no immunity against civil suits for actions taken before becoming president and ruled that a sexual harassment suit could proceed without delay, even against a sitting president. The 2019 Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election detailed evidence of possible obstruction of justice, but investigators declined to refer Donald Trump for prosecution based on a United States Department of Justice policy against indicting an incumbent president. The report noted that impeachment by Congress was available as a remedy. As of October 2019, a case was pending in the federal courts regarding access to personal tax returns in a criminal case brought against Donald Trump by the New York County District Attorney alleging violations of New York state law.\n\nLeadership roles\nHead of state\nAs head of state, the president represents the United States government to its own people and represents the nation to the rest of the world. For example, during a state visit by a foreign head of state, the president typically hosts a State Arrival Ceremony held on the South Lawn, a custom begun by John F. Kennedy in 1961. This is followed by a state dinner given by the president which is held in the State Dining Room later in the evening.\n\nAs a national leader, the president also fulfills many less formal ceremonial duties. For example, William Howard Taft started the tradition of throwing out the ceremonial first pitch in 1910 at Griffith Stadium, Washington, D.C., on the Washington Senators's Opening Day. Every president since Taft, except for Jimmy Carter, threw out at least one ceremonial first ball or pitch for Opening Day, the All-Star Game, or the World Series, usually with much fanfare. Every president since Theodore Roosevelt has served as honorary president of the Boy Scouts of America.\nOther presidential traditions are associated with American holidays. Rutherford B. Hayes began in 1878 the first White House egg rolling for local children. Beginning in 1947, during the Harry S. Truman administration, every Thanksgiving the president is presented with a live domestic turkey during the annual National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation held at the White House. Since 1989, when the custom of \"pardoning\" the turkey was formalized by George H. W. Bush, the turkey has been taken to a farm where it will live out the rest of its natural life.\nPresidential traditions also involve the president's role as head of government. Many outgoing presidents since James Buchanan traditionally give advice to their successor during the presidential transition. Ronald Reagan and his successors have also left a private message on the desk of the Oval Office on Inauguration Day for the incoming president.\nThe modern presidency holds the president as one of the nation's premier celebrities. Some argue that images of the presidency have a tendency to be manipulated by administration public relations officials as well as by presidents themselves. One critic described the presidency as \"propagandized leadership\" which has a \"mesmerizing power surrounding the office\". Administration public relations managers staged carefully crafted photo-ops of smiling presidents with smiling crowds for television cameras. One critic wrote the image of John F. Kennedy was described as carefully framed \"in rich detail\" which \"drew on the power of myth\" regarding the incident of PT 109 and wrote that Kennedy understood how to use images to further his presidential ambitions. As a result, some political commentators have opined that American voters have unrealistic expectations of presidents: voters expect a president to \"drive the economy, vanquish enemies, lead the free world, comfort tornado victims, heal the national soul and protect borrowers from hidden credit-card fees\".\n\nHead of party\nThe president is typically considered to be the head of their political party. Since the entire House of Representatives and at least one-third of the Senate is elected simultaneously with the president, candidates from a political party inevitably have their electoral success intertwined with the performance of the party's presidential candidate. The coattail effect, or lack thereof, will also often impact a party's candidates at state and local levels of government as well. However, there are often tensions between a president and others in the party, with presidents who lose significant support from their party's caucus in Congress generally viewed to be weaker and less effective.\n\nGlobal leader\nWith the rise of the United States as a superpower in the 20th century, and the United States having the world's largest economy into the 21st century, the president is typically viewed as a global leader, and at times the world's most powerful political figure. The position of the United States as the leading member of NATO, and the country's strong relationships with other wealthy or democratic nations like those comprising the European Union, have led to the moniker that the president is the \"leader of the free world\".\n\nSelection process\nEligibility\nArticle II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution sets three qualifications for holding the presidency. To serve as president, one must:\n\nbe a natural-born citizen of the United States;\nbe at least 35 years old;\nbe a resident in the United States for at least 14 years.\nA person who meets the above qualifications would, however, still be disqualified from holding the office of president under any of the following conditions:\n\nUnder Article I, Section 3, Clause 7, having been impeached, convicted and disqualified from holding further public office, although there is some legal debate as to whether the disqualification clause also includes the presidential office: the only previous persons disqualified under this clause were three federal judges.\nUnder Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, no person who swore an oath to support the Constitution, and later rebelled against the United States, is eligible to hold any office. However, this disqualification can be lifted by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress. There is, again, some debate as to whether the clause as written allows disqualification from the presidential position, or whether it would first require litigation outside of Congress, although there is precedent for use of this amendment outside of the original intended purpose of excluding Confederates from public office after the Civil War.\nUnder the Twenty-second Amendment, no person can be elected president more than twice. The amendment also specifies that if any eligible person serves as president or acting president for more than two years of a term for which some other eligible person was elected president, the former can only be elected president once.\n\nCampaigns and nomination\nThe modern presidential campaign begins before the primary elections, which the two major political parties use to clear the field of candidates before their national nominating conventions, where the most successful candidate is made the party's presidential nominee. Typically, the party's presidential candidate chooses a vice presidential nominee, and this choice is rubber-stamped by the convention. The most common previous profession of presidents is lawyer.\nNominees participate in nationally televised debates, and while the debates are usually restricted to the Democratic and Republican nominees, third party candidates may be invited, such as Ross Perot in the 1992 debates. Nominees campaign across the country to explain their views, convince voters and solicit contributions. Much of the modern electoral process is concerned with winning swing states through frequent visits and mass media advertising drives.\n\nElection\nThe president is elected indirectly by the voters of each state and the District of Columbia through the Electoral College, a body of electors formed every four years for the sole purpose of electing the president and vice president to concurrent four-year terms. As prescribed by Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, each state is entitled to a number of electors equal to the size of its total delegation in both houses of Congress. Additionally, the Twenty-third Amendment provides that the District of Columbia is entitled to the number it would have if it were a state, but in no case more than that of the least populous state. Currently, all states and the District of Columbia select their electors based on a popular election. In all but two states, the party whose presidential–vice presidential ticket receives a plurality of popular votes in the state has its entire slate of elector nominees chosen as the state's electors. Maine and Nebraska deviate from this winner-take-all practice, awarding two electors to the statewide winner and one to the winner in each congressional district.\nOn the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, about six weeks after the election, the electors convene in their respective state capitals (and in Washington, D.C.) to vote for president and, on a separate ballot, for vice president. They typically vote for the candidates of the party that nominated them. While there is no constitutional mandate or federal law requiring them to do so, the District of Columbia and 32 states have laws requiring that their electors vote for the candidates to whom they are pledged. The constitutionality of these laws was upheld in Chiafalo v. Washington (2020). Following the vote, each state then sends a certified record of their electoral votes to Congress. The votes of the electors are opened and counted during a joint session of Congress, held in the first week of January. If a candidate has received an absolute majority of electoral votes for president (currently 270 of 538), that person is declared the winner. Otherwise, the House of Representatives must meet to elect a president using a contingent election procedure in which representatives, voting by state delegation, with each state casting a single vote, choose between the top three electoral vote-getters for president. To win the presidency, a candidate must receive the votes of an absolute majority of states (currently 26 of 50).\nThere have been two contingent presidential elections in the nation's history. A 73–73 electoral vote tie between Thomas Jefferson and fellow Democratic-Republican Aaron Burr in the election of 1800 necessitated the first. Conducted under the original procedure established by Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which stipulates that if two or three persons received a majority vote and an equal vote, the House of Representatives would choose one of them for president; the runner-up would become vice president. On February 17, 1801, Jefferson was elected president on the 36th ballot, and Burr elected vice president. Afterward, the system was overhauled through the Twelfth Amendment in time to be used in the 1804 election. A quarter-century later, the choice for president again devolved to the House when no candidate won an absolute majority of electoral votes (131 of 261) in the election of 1824. Under the Twelfth Amendment, the House was required to choose a president from among the top three electoral vote recipients: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and William H. Crawford. Held February 9, 1825, this second and most recent contingent election resulted in John Quincy Adams being elected president on the first ballot.\n\nInauguration\nPursuant to the Twentieth Amendment, the four-year term of office for both the president and the vice president begins at noon on January 20, in the year following the preceding presidential election. The first presidential and vice presidential terms to begin on this date, known as Inauguration Day, were the second terms of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Vice President John Nance Garner in 1937. Previously, Inauguration Day was on March 4. As a result of the date change, the first term (1933–37) of both men had been shortened by 43 days.\nBefore executing the powers of the office, a president is required to recite the presidential Oath of Office, found in Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the Constitution. This is the only component in the inauguration ceremony mandated by the Constitution:\n\nI do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.\nPresidents have traditionally placed one hand upon a Bible while taking the oath, and have added \"So help me God\" to the end of the oath. Although the oath may be administered by any person authorized by law to administer oaths, presidents are traditionally sworn in by the chief justice of the United States.\n\nIncumbency\nTerm limit\nWhen the first president, George Washington, announced in his Farewell Address that he was not running for a third term, he established a \"two terms then out\" precedent. Precedent became tradition after Thomas Jefferson publicly embraced the principle a decade later during his second term, as did his two immediate successors, James Madison and James Monroe. In spite of the strong two-term tradition, Ulysses S. Grant sought nomination at the 1880 Republican National Convention for a non-consecutive third term, but was unsuccessful.\nIn 1940, after leading the nation through the Great Depression and focused on supporting U.S. allied nations at war with the Axis powers, Franklin Roosevelt was elected to a third term, breaking the long-standing precedent. Four years later, with the U.S. engaged in World War II, he was re-elected again despite his declining physical health; he died 82 days into his fourth term on April 12, 1945.\nIn response to the unprecedented length of Roosevelt's presidency, the Twenty-second Amendment was adopted in 1951. The amendment bars anyone from being elected president more than twice, or once if that person served more than two years (24 months) of another president's four-year term. Harry S. Truman, the president at the time it was submitted to the states by the Congress, was exempted from its limitations. Without the exemption, he would not have been eligible to run for a second full term in 1952 (which he briefly sought), as he had served nearly all of Franklin Roosevelt's unexpired 1945–1949 term and had been elected to a full four-year term beginning in 1949. Since becoming operative in 1951, the amendment has been applicable to six twice-elected presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.\n\nVacancies and succession\nUnder Section 1 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, the vice president becomes president upon the removal from office, death, or resignation of the president. Deaths have occurred a number of times, resignation has occurred only once, and removal from office has never occurred.\nBefore the ratification of the Twenty-fifth amendment (which clarified the matter of succession), Article II, Section 1, Clause 6, stated only that the vice president assumes the \"powers and duties\" of the presidency in the event of a president's removal, death, resignation, or inability. Under this clause, there was ambiguity about whether the vice president would actually become president in the event of a vacancy, or simply act as president, potentially resulting in a special election. Upon the death of President William Henry Harrison in 1841, Vice President John Tyler declared that he had succeeded to the office itself, refusing to accept any papers addressed to the \"Acting President\", and Congress ultimately accepted it.\nIn the event of a double vacancy, Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 also authorizes Congress to declare who shall become acting president in the \"Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the president and vice president\". The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 (codified as 3 U.S.C. § 19) provides that if both the president and vice president have left office or are both otherwise unavailable to serve during their terms of office, the presidential line of succession follows the order of: speaker of the House, then, if necessary, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and then if necessary, the eligible heads of federal executive departments who form the president's cabinet. The cabinet currently has 15 members, of which the secretary of state is first in line; the other Cabinet secretaries follow in the order in which their department (or the department of which their department is the successor) was created. Those individuals who are constitutionally ineligible to be elected to the presidency are also disqualified from assuming the powers and duties of the presidency through succession. No statutory successor has yet been called upon to act as president.\n\nDeclarations of inability\nUnder the Twenty-fifth Amendment, the president may temporarily transfer the presidential powers and duties to the vice president, who then becomes acting president, by transmitting to the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate a statement that he is unable to discharge his duties. The president resumes his or her powers upon transmitting a second declaration stating that he is again able. The mechanism has been used by Ronald Reagan (once), George W. Bush (twice), and Joe Biden (once), each in anticipation of surgery.\nThe Twenty-fifth Amendment also provides that the vice president, together with a majority of certain members of the Cabinet, may transfer the presidential powers and duties to the vice president by transmitting a written declaration, to the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate, to the effect that the president is unable to discharge his or her powers and duties. If the president then declares that no such inability exist, he or she resumes the presidential powers unless the vice president and Cabinet make a second declaration of presidential inability, in which case Congress decides the question.\n\nRemoval\nArticle II, Section 4 of the Constitution allows for the removal of high federal officials, including the president, from office for \"treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors\". Article I, Section 2, Clause 5 authorizes the House of Representatives to serve as a \"grand jury\" with the power to impeach said officials by a majority vote. Article I, Section 3, Clause 6 authorizes the Senate to serve as a court with the power to remove impeached officials from office, by a two-thirds vote to convict.\nThree presidents have been impeached by the House of Representatives: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021; none have been convicted by the Senate. Additionally, the House Judiciary Committee conducted an impeachment inquiry against Richard Nixon in 1973–74 and reported  three articles of impeachment to the House of Representatives for final action; however, he resigned from office before the House voted on them.\n\nCircumvention of authority\nControversial measures have sometimes been taken short of removal to deal with perceived recklessness on the part of the president, or with a long-term disability. In some cases, staff have intentionally failed to deliver messages to or from the president, typically to avoid executing or promoting the president to write certain orders. This has ranged from Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff not transmitting orders to the Cabinet due to the president's heavy drinking, to staff removing memos from Donald Trump's desk. Decades before the Twenty-fifth Amendment, in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson had a stroke that left him partly incapacitated.  First lady Edith Wilson kept this condition a secret from the public for a while, and controversially became the sole gatekeeper for access to the president (aside from his doctor), assisting him with paperwork and deciding which information was \"important\" enough to share with him.\n\nCompensation\nSince 2001, the president's annual salary has been $400,000, along with a: $50,000 expense allowance; $100,000 nontaxable travel account, and $19,000 entertainment account. The president's salary is set by Congress, and under Article II, Section 1, Clause 7 of the Constitution, any increase or reduction in presidential salary cannot take effect before the next presidential term of office.\n\nResidence\nThe Executive Residence of the White House in Washington, D.C. is the official residence of the president. The site was selected by George Washington, and the cornerstone was laid in 1792. Every president since John Adams (in 1800) has lived there. At various times in U.S. history, it has been known as the \"President's Palace\", the \"President's House\", and the \"Executive Mansion\". Theodore Roosevelt officially gave the White House its current name in 1901. The federal government pays for state dinners and other official functions, but the president pays for personal, family, and guest dry cleaning and food.\nCamp David, officially titled Naval Support Facility Thurmont, a mountain-based military camp in Frederick County, Maryland, is the president's country residence. A place of solitude and tranquility, the site has been used extensively to host foreign dignitaries since the 1940s.\nPresident's Guest House, located next to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House Complex and Lafayette Park, serves as the president's official guest house and as a secondary residence for the president if needed. Four interconnected, 19th-century houses—Blair House, Lee House, and 700 and 704 Jackson Place—with a combined floor space exceeding 70,000 square feet (6,500 m2) comprise the property.\n\n\tPresidential residences\n\nTravel\nThe primary means of long-distance air travel for the president is one of two identical Boeing VC-25 aircraft, which are extensively modified Boeing 747 airliners and are referred to as Air Force One while the president is on board (although any U.S. Air Force aircraft the president is aboard is designated as \"Air Force One\" for the duration of the flight). In-country trips are typically handled with just one of the two planes, while overseas trips are handled with both, one primary and one backup. The president also has access to smaller Air Force aircraft, most notably the Boeing C-32, which are used when the president must travel to airports that cannot support a jumbo jet. Any civilian aircraft the president is aboard is designated Executive One for the flight.\nFor short-distance air travel, the president has access to a fleet of U.S. Marine Corps helicopters of varying models, designated Marine One when the president is aboard any particular one in the fleet. Flights are typically handled with as many as five helicopters all flying together and frequently swapping positions as to disguise which helicopter the president is actually aboard to any would-be threats.\nFor ground travel, the president uses the presidential state car, which is an armored limousine designed to look like a Cadillac sedan, but built on a truck chassis. The U.S. Secret Service operates and maintains the fleet of several limousines. The president also has access to two armored motorcoaches, which are primarily used for touring trips.\n\n\tPresidential transportation\n\nProtection\nThe U.S. Secret Service is charged with protecting the president and the first family. As part of their protection, presidents, first ladies, their children and other immediate family members, and other prominent persons and locations are assigned Secret Service codenames. The use of such names was originally for security purposes and dates to a time when sensitive electronic communications were not routinely encrypted; today, the names simply serve for purposes of brevity, clarity, and tradition.\n\nPost-presidency\nActivities\nSome former presidents have had significant careers after leaving office. Prominent examples include William Howard Taft's tenure as chief justice of the United States and Herbert Hoover's work on government reorganization after World War II. Grover Cleveland, whose bid for reelection failed in 1888, was elected president again four years later in 1892. Two former presidents served in Congress after leaving the White House: John Quincy Adams was elected to the House of Representatives, serving there for 17 years, and Andrew Johnson returned to the Senate in 1875, though he died soon after. Some ex-presidents were very active, especially in international affairs, most notably Theodore Roosevelt; Herbert Hoover; Richard Nixon; and Jimmy Carter.\nPresidents may use their predecessors as emissaries to deliver private messages to other nations or as official representatives of the United States to state funerals and other important foreign events. Richard Nixon made multiple foreign trips to countries including China and Russia and was lauded as an elder statesman. Jimmy Carter has become a global human rights campaigner, international arbiter, and election monitor, as well as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Bill Clinton has also worked as an informal ambassador, most recently in the negotiations that led to the release of two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, from North Korea. During his presidency, George W. Bush called on former Presidents Bush and Clinton to assist with humanitarian efforts after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. President Obama followed suit by asking Presidents Clinton and Bush to lead efforts to aid Haiti after an earthquake devastated that country in 2010.\nClinton was active politically since his presidential term ended, working with his wife Hillary on her 2008 and 2016 presidential bids and President Obama on his 2012 reelection campaign. Obama was also active politically since his presidential term ended, having worked with his former vice president Joe Biden on his 2020 election campaign. Trump has continued to make appearances in the media and at conferences and rallies since leaving office in 2021. He is currently running for a non-consecutive second term in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.\n\nPension and other benefits\nThe Former Presidents Act (FPA), enacted in 1958, grants lifetime benefits to former presidents and their widows, including a monthly pension, medical care in military facilities, health insurance, and Secret Service protection; also provided is funding for a certain number of staff and for office expenses.  The act has been amended several times to provide increases in presidential pensions and in the allowances for office staff.  The FPA excludes any president who was removed from office by impeachment.\nAccording to a 2008 report by the Congressional Research Service:\n\nChief executives leaving office prior to 1958 often entered retirement pursuing various occupations and received no federal assistance. When industrialist Andrew Carnegie announced a plan in 1912 to offer $25,000 annual pensions to former Presidents, many Members of Congress deemed it inappropriate that such a pension would be provided by a private corporation executive. That same year, legislation was first introduced to create presidential pensions, but it was not enacted. In 1955, such legislation was considered by Congress because of former President Harry S. Truman's financial limitations in hiring an office staff\nThe pension has increased numerous times with congressional approval. Retired presidents receive a pension based on the salary of the current administration's cabinet secretaries, which was $199,700 per year in 2012. Former presidents who served in Congress may also collect congressional pensions. The act also provides former presidents with travel funds and franking privileges.\nPrior to 1997, all former presidents, their spouses, and their children until age 16 were protected by the Secret Service until the president's death. In 1997, Congress passed legislation limiting Secret Service protection to no more than 10 years from the date a president leaves office. On January 10, 2013, President Obama signed legislation reinstating lifetime Secret Service protection for him, George W. Bush, and all subsequent presidents. A first spouse who remarries is no longer eligible for Secret Service protection.\n\nPresidential libraries\nEvery president since Herbert Hoover has created a repository known as a presidential library for preserving and making available his papers, records, and other documents and materials. Completed libraries are deeded to and maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); the initial funding for building and equipping each library must come from private, non-federal sources. There are currently thirteen presidential libraries in the NARA system. There are also presidential libraries maintained by state governments and private foundations and Universities of Higher Education, including:\n\nThe Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, which is run by the State of Illinois;\nThe George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, which is run by Southern Methodist University;\nThe George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, which is run by Texas A&M University; and\nThe Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum, which is run by the University of Texas at Austin.\nSeveral former presidents have overseen the building and opening of their own presidential libraries. Some even made arrangements for their own burial at the site. Several presidential libraries contain the graves of the president they document: \n\nThe Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri;\nThe Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home in Abilene, Kansas;\nThe Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California; and\nThe Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California.\nThese gravesites are open to the general public.\n\nPolitical affiliation\nPolitical parties have dominated American politics for most of the nation's history. Though the Founding Fathers generally spurned political parties as divisive and disruptive, and their rise had not been anticipated when the U.S. Constitution was drafted in 1787, organized political parties developed in the U.S. in the mid-1790s nonetheless. They evolved from political factions, which began to appear almost immediately after the Federal government came into existence. Those who supported the Washington administration were referred to as \"pro-administration\" and would eventually form the Federalist Party, while those in opposition largely joined the emerging Democratic-Republican Party.\nGreatly concerned about the very real capacity of political parties to destroy the fragile unity holding the nation together, Washington remained unaffiliated with any political faction or party throughout his eight-year presidency. He was, and remains, the only U.S. president never to be affiliated with a political party. Since Washington, every U.S. president has been affiliated with a political party at the time of assuming office.\nThe number of presidents per political party by their affiliation at the time they were first sworn into office (alphabetical, by last name) are:\n\nTimeline of presidents\nThe following timeline depicts the progression of the presidents and their political affiliation at the time of assuming office.\n\nSee also\nOutline of American politics\n\nNotes\nReferences\nFurther reading\nExternal links\n\nWhite House homepage\nUnited States Presidents Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University\n\nJames Buchanan Jr. ( bew-KAN-ən; April 23, 1791 – June 1, 1868) was the 15th president of the United States, serving from 1857 to 1861. Buchanan also served as the secretary of state from 1845 to 1849 and represented Pennsylvania in both houses of the U.S. Congress. He was an advocate for states' rights, particularly regarding slavery, and minimized the role of the federal government preceding the Civil War.\nBuchanan was a lawyer in Pennsylvania and won his first election to the state's House of Representatives as a Federalist. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1820 and retained that post for five terms, aligning with Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party. Buchanan served as Jackson's minister to Russia in 1832. He won the election in 1834 as a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and continued in that position for 11 years. He was appointed to serve as President James K. Polk's secretary of state in 1845, and eight years later was named as President Franklin Pierce's minister to the United Kingdom.\nBeginning in 1844, Buchanan became a regular contender for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. He was nominated and won the 1856 presidential election. As President, Buchanan intervened to assure the Supreme Court's majority ruling in the pro-slavery decision in the Dred Scott case. He acceded to Southern attempts to engineer Kansas' entry into the Union as a slave state under the Lecompton Constitution, and angered not only Republicans but also Northern Democrats. Buchanan honored his pledge to serve only one term and supported Breckinridge's unsuccessful candidacy in the 1860 presidential election. He failed to reconcile the fractured Democratic Party amid the grudge against Stephen Douglas, leading to the election of Republican and former Congressman Abraham Lincoln.\nBuchanan's leadership during his lame duck period, before the American Civil War, has been widely criticized. He simultaneously angered the North by not stopping secession and the South by not yielding to their demands. He supported the Corwin Amendment in an effort to reconcile the country. He made an unsuccessful attempt to reinforce Fort Sumter, but otherwise refrained from preparing the military. In his personal life, Buchanan never married and was the only U.S. president to remain a lifelong bachelor, leading some historians and authors to question his sexual orientation. His failure to forestall the Civil War has been described as incompetence, and he spent his last years defending his reputation. Historians and scholars rank Buchanan as among the worst presidents in American history.\n\nEarly life\nChildhood and education\nJames Buchanan Jr. was born into a Scottish-Irish family on April 23, 1791, in a log cabin on a farm called Stony Batter, near Cove Gap, Peters Township, in the Allegheny Mountains of southern Pennsylvania. He was the last president born in the 18th century and, until the election of Joe Biden in 2020, the only one born in Pennsylvania. Buchanan was the second of eleven children with six sisters and four brothers, and the eldest son of James Buchanan Sr. (1761–1821) and his wife Elizabeth Speer (1767–1833). James Buchanan Sr., was an Ulster-Scot from just outside Ramelton, a small town in the north-east of County Donegal in the north-west of Ulster, the northern province in Ireland, who emigrated to the newly formed United States in 1783, having sailed from Derry. He belonged to the Clan Buchanan, whose members had emigrated in large numbers from the Scottish Highlands to Ulster in the north of Ireland during the Plantation of Ulster in the seventeenth century and, later, largely because of poverty and persecution by the Crown due to their Presbyterian faith, had further emigrated in large numbers from Ulster to America from the early eighteenth century onwards. Shortly after Buchanan's birth, the family relocated to a farm near Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, and later settled in the town in 1794. His father became the area's wealthiest resident, working as a merchant, farmer, and real estate investor. Buchanan attributed his early education primarily to his mother, whereas his father had a greater influence on his character. His mother had discussed politics with him as a child and had an interest in poetry, quoting John Milton and William Shakespeare to Buchanan.\nBuchanan attended the Old Stone Academy in Mercersburg and then Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In 1808, he was nearly expelled for disorderly conduct; he and his fellow students had attracted negative attention for drinking in local taverns, disturbing the peace at night and committing acts of vandalism, but he pleaded for a second chance and ultimately graduated with honors in 1809. Later that year, he moved to the state capital at Lancaster, to train as a lawyer for two and a half years with the well-known James Hopkins. Following the fashion of the time, Buchanan studied the United States Code and the Constitution of the United States as well as legal authorities such as William Blackstone during his education.\n\nEarly law practice and Pennsylvania House of Representatives\nIn 1812, Buchanan passed the bar exam and after being admitted to the bar, he remained in Lancaster, even when Harrisburg became the new capital of Pennsylvania. Buchanan quickly established himself as a prominent legal representative in the city. His income rapidly rose after he established his practice, and by 1821 he was earning over $11,000 per year (equivalent to $250,000 in 2023). At this time, Buchanan became a Freemason, and served as the Worshipful Master of Masonic Lodge No. 43 in Lancaster and as a District Deputy Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania.\nBuchanan also served as chairman of the Lancaster chapter of the Federalist Party. Like his father, he supported their political program, which provided federal funds for building projects and import duties as well as the re-establishment of a central bank after the First Bank of the United States' license expired in 1811. He became a strong critic of Democratic-Republican President James Madison during the War of 1812. Although he did not himself serve in a militia during the War of 1812, during the British occupation he joined a group of young men who stole horses for the United States Army in the Baltimore area. He was the last president involved in the War of 1812.\nIn 1814, he was elected for the Federalists to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, where he was the youngest member, and held this seat until 1816. Since the sessions in the Pennsylvania General Assembly lasted only three months, Buchanan continued practicing law at a profit by charging higher fees, and his service helped him acquire more clients. In 1815, Buchanan defended District Judge Walter Franklin in an impeachment trial before the Pennsylvania Senate, over alleged judicial misconduct. Impeachments were more common at the time because the line between abuse of office and a wrong legal decision was determined by the ruling parties' preferences and the popularity of the judge's decision. Buchanan persuaded the senators that only judicial crimes and clear violations of the law justified impeachment.\n\nCongressional career\nU.S. House of Representatives\nIn the congressional elections of 1820, Buchanan ran for a seat in the House of Representatives. Shortly after his election victory, his father died in a carriage accident. As a young Representative, Buchanan was one of the most prominent leaders of the \"Amalgamator party\" faction of Pennsylvanian politics, named that because it was made up of both Democratic-Republicans and former Federalists, which transitioned from the First Party System to the Era of Good Feelings. During this era, the Democratic-Republicans became the most influential party. Buchanan's Federalist convictions were weak, and he switched parties after opposing a nativist Federalist bill. During the 1824 presidential election, Buchanan initially supported Henry Clay, but switched to Andrew Jackson (with Clay as a second choice) when it became clear that the Pennsylvanian public overwhelmingly preferred Jackson. After Jackson lost the 1824 election, he joined his faction, but Jackson had contempt for Buchanan due to his misinterpretation of his efforts to mediate between the Clay and Jackson camps.\nIn Washington, Buchanan became an avid defender of states' rights, and was close with many southern Congressmen, viewing some New England Congressmen as dangerous radicals. Buchanan's close proximity to his constituency allowed him to establish a Democratic coalition in Pennsylvania, consisting of former Federalist farmers, Philadelphia artisans, and Ulster-Scots-Americans. In the 1828 presidential election, he secured Pennsylvania, while the \"Jacksonian Democrats\", an independent party after splitting from the National Republican Party, won an easy victory in the parallel congressional election.\n\nBuchanan gained most attention during an impeachment trial where he acted as prosecutor for federal district judge James H. Peck; however, the Senate rejected Buchanan's plea and acquitted Peck by a majority vote. He was appointed to the Agriculture Committee in his first year, and he eventually became chairman of the Judiciary Committee. In 1831, Buchanan declined a nomination for the 22nd United States Congress from his constituency consisting of Dauphin, Lebanon, and Lancaster counties. He still had political ambitions and some Pennsylvania Democrats put him forward as a candidate for the vice presidency in the 1832 election.\n\nMinister to Russia\nAfter Jackson was re-elected in 1832, he offered Buchanan the position of United States Ambassador to Russia. Buchanan was reluctant to leave the country, as the distant St. Petersburg was a kind of political exile, which was the intention of Jackson, who considered Buchanan to be an \"incompetent busybody\" and untrustworthy, but he ultimately agreed. His work focused on concluding a trade and shipping treaty with Russia. While Buchanan was successful with the former, negotiating an agreement on free merchant shipping with Foreign Minister Karl Nesselrode proved difficult. He had denounced Tsar Nicholas I as a despot merely a year prior during his tenure in Congress; many Americans had reacted negatively to Russia's reaction to the 1830 Polish uprising.\n\nU.S. Senator\nBuchanan returned home and lost the election in the State Legislature for a full six-year term in the 23rd Congress, but was appointed by the Pennsylvania state legislature to succeed William Wilkins in the U.S. Senate. Wilkins, in turn, replaced Buchanan as the ambassador to Russia. The Jacksonian Buchanan, who was re-elected in 1836 and 1842, opposed the re-chartering of the Second Bank of the United States and sought to expunge a congressional censure of Jackson stemming from the Bank War. Buchanan served in the Senate until March 1845 and was twice confirmed in office. To unite Pennsylvania Democrats at the State Convention, he was chosen as their candidate for the National Convention. Buchanan maintained a strict adherence to the Pennsylvania State Legislature's guidelines and sometimes voted against positions in Congress which he promoted in his own speeches, despite open ambitions for the White House.\nBuchanan was known for his commitment to states' rights and the Manifest Destiny ideology. He rejected President Martin Van Buren's offer to become United States Attorney General and chaired prestigious Senate committees such as the Committee on the Judiciary and the Committee on Foreign Relations. Buchanan was one of only a few senators to vote against the Webster–Ashburton Treaty for its \"surrender\" of lands to the United Kingdom, as he demanded the entire Aroostook River Valley for the United States. In the Oregon Boundary Dispute, Buchanan adopted the maximum demand of 54°40′ as the northern border and spoke out in favor of annexing the Republic of Texas. During the contentious 1838 Pennsylvania gubernatorial election, Buchanan chose to support the Democratic challenger, David Rittenhouse Porter, who was elected by fewer than 5,500 votes as Pennsylvania's first governor under the state's revised Constitution of 1838.\nBuchanan also opposed a gag rule sponsored by John C. Calhoun that would have suppressed anti-slavery petitions. He joined the majority in blocking the rule, with most senators of the belief that it would have the reverse effect of strengthening the abolitionists. He said, \"We have just as little right to interfere with slavery in the South, as we have to touch the right of petition.\" Buchanan thought that the issue of slavery was the domain of the states, and he faulted abolitionists for exciting passions over the issue. In the lead-up to the 1844 Democratic National Convention, Buchanan positioned himself as a potential alternative to former President Martin Van Buren, but the nomination went to James K. Polk, who won the election.\n\nDiplomatic career\nSecretary of State\nBuchanan was offered the position of Secretary of State in the Polk administration or, as the alternative, a seat on the Supreme Court, to compensate him for his support in the election campaign but also in order to eliminate him as an internal party rival. He accepted the State Department post and served for the duration of Polk's single term in office. During his tenure, the United States recorded its largest territorial gain in history through the Oregon Treaty and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which included territory that is now Texas, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. In negotiations with Britain over Oregon, Buchanan initially favored the 49th parallel as the boundary of Oregon Territory, while Polk called for a more northerly boundary line. When Northern Democrats rallied around the popular slogan Fifty-Four Forty or Fight (\"54°40′ or war\") in the 1844 election campaign, Buchanan adopted this position, but later followed Polk's direction, leading to the Oregon Compromise of 1846, which established the 49th parallel as the boundary in the Pacific Northwest.\nIn regards to Mexico, Buchanan maintained a dubious view that its attack on American troops on the other side of the Rio Grande in April 1846 constituted a border violation and a legitimate reason for war. During the Mexican-American War, Buchanan initially advised against claiming territory south of the Rio Grande, fearing war with Britain and France. However, as the war came to an end, Buchanan changed his mind and argued for the annexation of further territory, arguing that Mexico was to blame for the war and that the compensation negotiated for the American losses was too low. Buchanan sought the nomination at the 1848 Democratic National Convention, as Polk had promised to serve only one term, but he only won the support of the Pennsylvania and Virginia delegations, so Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan was nominated.\n\nCivilian life and 1852 presidential election\nWith the 1848 election of Whig Zachary Taylor, Buchanan returned to private life. Buchanan was getting on in years and still dressed in the old-fashioned style of his adolescence, earning him the nickname \"Old Public Functionary\" from the press. Slavery opponents in the North mocked him as a relic of prehistoric man because of his moral values. He bought the house of Wheatland on the outskirts of Lancaster and entertained various visitors while monitoring political events. During this period, Buchanan became the center of a family network consisting of 22 nieces, nephews and their descendants, seven of whom were orphans. He found public service jobs for some through patronage, and for those in his favor, he took on the role of surrogate father. He formed the strongest emotional bond with his niece Harriet Lane, who later became First Lady for Buchanan in the White House.\nIn 1852, he was named president of the Board of Trustees of Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, and he served in this capacity until 1866. Buchanan did not completely leave politics. He intended to publish a collection of speeches and an autobiography, but his political comeback was thwarted by the 1852 presidential election. Buchanan traveled to Washington to discuss Pennsylvania Democratic Party politics, which were divided into two camps led by Simon Cameron and George Dallas. He quietly campaigned for the 1852 Democratic presidential nomination. In light of the Compromise of 1850, which had led to the admission of California into the Union as a free state and a stricter Fugitive Slave Act, Buchanan now rejected the Missouri Compromise and welcomed Congress's rejection of the Wilmot Proviso, which prohibited slavery in all territories gained in the Mexican-American War. Buchanan criticized abolitionism as a fanatical attitude and believed that slavery should be decided by state legislatures, not Congress. He disliked abolitionist Northerners due to his party affiliation, and became known as a \"doughface\" due to his sympathy toward the South. Buchanan emerged as a promising candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, alongside Lewis Cass, Stephen Douglas, and William L. Marcy; however, the Pennsylvania convention did not vote unanimously in his favor, with over 30 delegates protesting against him. At the 1852 Democratic National Convention, he won the support of many southern delegates but failed to win the two-thirds support needed for the presidential nomination, which went to Franklin Pierce. Buchanan declined to serve as the vice presidential nominee, and the convention instead nominated his close friend, William R. King.\n\nMinister to the United Kingdom\nPierce won the election in 1852, and six months later, Buchanan accepted the position of United States Minister to the United Kingdom, a position that represented a step backward in his career and that he had twice previously rejected. Buchanan sailed for England in the summer of 1853, and he remained abroad for the next three years. In 1850, the United States and Great Britain signed the Clayton–Bulwer Treaty, which committed both countries to joint control of any future canal that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through Central America. Buchanan met repeatedly with Lord Clarendon, the British foreign minister, in hopes of pressuring the British to withdraw from Central America. He was able to reduce British influence in Honduras and Nicaragua while also raising the kingdom's awareness of American interests in the region. He also focused on the potential annexation of Cuba, which had long interested him.\nAt Pierce's prompting, Buchanan met in Ostend, Belgium, with U.S. Ambassador to Spain Pierre Soulé and U.S. Ambassador to France John Mason, to work out a plan for the acquisition of Cuba. A memorandum draft resulted, called the Ostend Manifesto, which proposed the purchase of Cuba from Spain, then in the midst of revolution and near bankruptcy. The document declared the island \"as necessary to the North American republic as any of its present ... family of states\". Against Buchanan's recommendation, the final draft of the manifesto suggested that \"wresting it from Spain\", if Spain refused to sell, would be justified \"by every law, human and Divine\". The manifesto was met with a divided response and was never acted upon. It weakened the Pierce administration and reduced support for Manifest Destiny. In 1855, as Buchanan's desire to return home grew, Pierce asked him to hold the fort in London in light of the relocation of a British fleet to the Caribbean.\n\nElection of 1856\nBuchanan's service abroad allowed him to conveniently avoid the debate over the Kansas–Nebraska Act then roiling the country in the slavery dispute. While he did not overtly seek the presidency, he assented to the movement on his behalf. While still in England, he campaigned by praising John Joseph Hughes, who was Archbishop of New York, to a Catholic archbishop. The latter campaigned for Buchanan among high-ranking Catholics as soon as he heard about it. When Buchanan arrived home at the end of April 1856, he led on the first ballot, supported by powerful Senators John Slidell, Jesse Bright, and Thomas F. Bayard, who presented Buchanan as an experienced leader appealing to the North and South. The 1856 Democratic National Convention met in June 1856, producing a platform that reflected Buchanan's views, including support for the Fugitive Slave Law, which required the return of escaped slaves. The platform also called for an end to anti-slavery agitation and U.S. \"ascendancy in the Gulf of Mexico\". President Pierce hoped for re-nomination, while Senator Stephen A. Douglas also loomed as a strong candidate. He won the nomination after seventeen ballots after Douglas' resignation. He was joined on the ticket by John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky in order to maintain regional proportional representation, placating supporters of Pierce and Douglas, also allies of Breckinridge.\nBuchanan faced two candidates in the general election: former Whig President Millard Fillmore ran as the candidate for the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party (or \"Know-Nothing\"), while John C. Frémont ran as the Republican nominee.  The contrast between Buchanan and Frémont was particularly stark, with opposing caricaturists drawing the Democratic candidate as a fussy old man in drag. Buchanan did not actively campaign, but he wrote letters and pledged to uphold the Democratic platform. In the election, he carried every slave state except for Maryland, as well as five slavery-free states, including his home state of Pennsylvania. He won 45 percent of the popular vote and decisively won the electoral vote, taking 174 of 296 votes. His election made him the first president from Pennsylvania. In a combative victory speech, Buchanan denounced Republicans, calling them a \"dangerous\" and \"geographical\" party that had unfairly attacked the South. He also declared, \"the object of my administration will be to destroy sectional party, North or South, and to restore harmony to the Union under a national and conservative government.\" He set about this initially by feigning a sectional balance in his cabinet appointments.\n\nPresidency (1857–1861)\nInauguration\nBuchanan was inaugurated on March 4, 1857, taking the oath of office from Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. In his lengthy inaugural address, Buchanan committed himself to serving only one term, as his predecessor had done. He abhorred the growing divisions over slavery and its status in the territories, saying that Congress should play no role in determining the status of slavery in the states or territories. He proposed a solution based on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which stated that the principle of popular sovereignty was decisive, and Congress had no say in the matter. Buchanan recommended that a federal slave code be enacted to protect the rights of slaveowners in federal territories. He alluded to a then-pending Supreme Court case, Dred Scott v. Sandford, which he said would permanently settle the issue of slavery. Dred Scott was a slave who was temporarily taken from a slave state to a free territory by his owner, John Sanford. After Scott returned to the slave state, he filed a petition for his freedom based on his time in the free territory.\n\nAssociate Justice Robert C. Grier leaked the decision in the \"Dred Scott\" case early to Buchanan. In his inaugural address, Buchanan declared that the issue of slavery in the territories would be \"speedily and finally settled\" by the Supreme Court.  According to historian Paul Finkelman: Buchanan already knew what the Court was going to decide. In a major breach of Court etiquette, Justice Grier, who, like Buchanan, was from Pennsylvania, had kept the President-elect fully informed about the progress of the case and the internal debates within the Court. When Buchanan urged the nation to support the decision, he already knew what Taney would say. Republican suspicions of impropriety turned out to be fully justified.\nHistorians agree that the court decision was a major disaster because it dramatically inflamed tensions, leading to the Civil War. In 2022, historian David W. Blight argued that the year 1857 was, \"the great pivot on the road to disunion...largely because of the Dred Scott case, which stoked the fear, distrust and conspiratorial hatred already common in both the North and the South to new levels of intensity.\"\n\nPersonnel\nCabinet and administration\nAs his inauguration approached, Buchanan sought to establish an obedient, harmonious cabinet to avoid the in-fighting that had plagued Andrew Jackson's administration. The cabinet's composition had to do justice to the proportional representation within the party and between the regions of the country. Buchanan first worked on this task in Wheatland until he traveled to the capital in January 1857. There, like many other guests at the National Hotel, he contracted severe dysentery, from which he did not fully recover until several months later. Dozens of those who fell ill died, including Buchanan's nephew and private secretary Eskridge Lane.\nThe cabinet selection was disastrous, with four Southern ministers being large-scale slaveholders who later became loyal to the Confederate States of America. Secretary of the Treasury Howell Cobb was considered the greatest political talent in the Cabinet, while the three department heads from the northern states were all considered to be doughfaces.  His objective was to dominate the cabinet, and he chose men who would agree with his views. Buchanan had a troubled relationship with his vice president from the beginning, when he did not receive him during his inaugural visit but referred him to his niece and First Lady, which Breckinridge never forgave him for and saw as disrespectful. He left out the influential Stephen A. Douglas, who had made Buchanan's nomination possible by resigning at the National Convention the previous year, when filling the post. Concentrating on foreign policy, he appointed the aging Lewis Cass as Secretary of State. Buchanan's appointment of Southerners and their allies alienated many in the North, and his failure to appoint any followers of Douglas divided the party. Outside of the cabinet, he left in place many of Pierce's appointments but removed a disproportionate number of Northerners who had ties to Democratic opponents Pierce or Douglas.\n\nJudicial appointments\nBuchanan appointed one Justice, Nathan Clifford, to the Supreme Court of the United States. He appointed seven other federal judges to United States district courts. He also appointed two judges to the United States Court of Claims.\n\nIntervention in the Dred Scott case\nThe case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, to which Buchanan referred to in his inaugural address, dated back to 1846. Scott sued for his release in Missouri, claiming he lived in service to the proprietor in Illinois and Wisconsin Territory. The case reached the Supreme Court and gained national attention by 1856. Buchanan consulted with Judge John Catron in January 1857, inquiring about the outcome of the case and suggesting that a broader decision, beyond the specifics of the case, would be more prudent. Buchanan hoped that a broad decision protecting slavery in the territories could lay the issue to rest, allowing him to focus on other issues.\nCatron replied on February 10, saying that the Supreme Court's Southern majority would decide against Scott, but would likely have to publish the decision on narrow grounds unless Buchanan could convince his fellow Pennsylvanian, Justice Robert Cooper Grier, to join the majority of the court. Buchanan then wrote to Grier and prevailed upon him, providing the majority leverage to issue a broad-ranging decision sufficient to render the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional.\nTwo days after Buchanan was sworn in as president, Chief Justice Taney delivered the Dred Scott decision, which denied the petitioner's request to be set free from slavery. The ruling broadly asserted that Congress had no constitutional power to exclude slavery in the territories. According to this decision, slaves were forever the property of their owners without rights and no African American could ever be a full citizen of the United States, even if they had full civil rights in a state. Buchanan's letters were not made public at the time, but he was seen conversing quietly with the Chief Justice during his inauguration. When the decision was issued, Republicans began spreading the word that Taney had informed Buchanan of the impending outcome. Rather than destroying the Republican platform as Buchanan had hoped, the decision infuriated Northerners, who condemned it.\n\nPanic of 1857\nThe Panic of 1857 began in the summer of that year, when the New York branch of Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company announced its insolvency. The crisis spread rapidly, and by the fall, 1,400 state banks and 5,000 businesses had gone bankrupt. Unemployment and hunger became common in northern cities, but the agricultural south was more resilient. Buchanan agreed with the southerners who attributed the economic collapse to over-speculation.\nBuchanan acted in accordance with Jacksonian Democracy principles, which restricted paper money issuance, and froze federal funds for public works projects, causing resentment among some of the population due to his refusal to implement an economic stimulus program. While the government was \"without the power to extend relief\", it would continue to pay its debts in specie, and while it would not curtail public works, none would be added. In hopes of reducing paper money supplies and inflation, he urged the states to restrict the banks to a credit level of $3 to $1 of specie and discouraged the use of federal or state bonds as security for bank note issues. The economy recovered in several years, though many Americans suffered as a result of the panic. Buchanan had hoped to reduce the deficit, but by the time he left office the federal budget grew by 15%.\n\nUtah War\nIn the spring of 1857, the Latter-day Saints and their leader Brigham Young had been challenging federal representatives in Utah Territory, causing harassment and violence against non-Mormons. Young harassed federal officers and discouraged outsiders from settling in the Salt Lake City area. In September 1857, the Utah Territorial Militia, associated with the Latter-day Saints, perpetrated the Mountain Meadows massacre, in which Young's militia attacked a wagon train and killed 125 settlers. Buchanan was offended by the militarism and polygamous behavior of Young. With reports of violence against non-Mormons, Buchanan authorized a military expedition into Utah Territory in late March 1857 to replace Young as governor. The force consisted of 2,500 men, including Alfred Cumming and his staff, and was commanded by General William S. Harney. Complicating matters, Young's notice of his replacement was not delivered because the Pierce administration had annulled the Utah mail contract, and Young portrayed the approaching forces as an unauthorized overthrow.\nBuchanan's personnel decision incited resistance from the Mormons around Young, as Harney was known for his volatility and brutality. In August 1857, Albert S. Johnston replaced him for organizational reasons. Young reacted to the military action by mustering a two-week expedition, destroying wagon trains, oxen, and other Army property. Buchanan then dispatched Thomas L. Kane as a private agent to negotiate peace. The mission was successful, a peaceful agreement to replace Governor Young with Cumming was reached, and the Utah War ended. The President granted amnesty to inhabitants affirming loyalty to the government, and placed the federal troops at a peaceable distance for the balance of his administration.\nBuchanan did not comment on the conflict again until his State of the Union Address in December 1857, leaving open the question of whether it was a rebellion in Utah. One of Buchanan's last official acts in March 1861 was to reduce the size of Utah Territory in favor of Nevada, Colorado, and Nebraska. While the Latter-day Saints had frequently defied federal authority, some historians consider Buchanan's action was an inappropriate response to uncorroborated reports.\n\nTransatlantic telegraph cable\nBuchanan was the first recipient of an official telegram transmitted across the Atlantic. Following the dispatch of test and configuration telegrams, on August 16, 1858 Queen Victoria sent a 98-word message to Buchanan at his summer residence in the Bedford Springs Hotel in Pennsylvania, expressing hope that the newly laid cable would prove \"an additional link between the nations whose friendship is founded on their common interest and reciprocal esteem\". Queen Victoria's message took 16 hours to send.\nBuchanan responded: \"It is a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind, than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle. May the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of Heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world.\"\n\nBleeding Kansas and constitutional dispute\nThe Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 created the Kansas Territory and allowed the settlers there to decide whether to allow slavery. This resulted in violence between \"Free-Soil\" (antislavery) and pro-slavery settlers, which developed into the \"Bleeding Kansas\" period. The antislavery settlers, with the help of Northern abolitionists, organized their own territorial government in Topeka. The more numerous proslavery settlers, many from the neighboring slave state Missouri, established a government in Lecompton, giving the Territory two different governments for a time, with two distinct constitutions, each claiming legitimacy. The admission of Kansas as a state required a constitution be submitted to Congress with the approval of a majority of its residents. Under President Pierce, a series of violent confrontations escalated over who had the right to vote in Kansas. The situation drew national attention, and some in Georgia and Mississippi advocated secession should Kansas be admitted as a free state. Buchanan chose to endorse the pro-slavery Lecompton government.\nBuchanan appointed Robert J. Walker to replace John W. Geary as Territorial Governor, and there ensued conflicting referendums from Topeka and Lecompton, where election fraud occurred. In October 1857, the Lecompton government framed the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution that agreed to a referendum limited solely to the slavery question. However, the vote against slavery, as provided by the Lecompton Convention, would still permit existing slaves, and all their issue, to be enslaved, so there was no referendum that permitted the majority anti-slavery residents to prohibit slavery in Kansas. As a result, anti-slavery residents boycotted the referendum since it did not provide a meaningful choice.\nDespite the protests of Walker and two former Kansas governors, Buchanan decided to accept the Lecompton Constitution. In a December 1857 meeting with Stephen A. Douglas, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, Buchanan demanded that all Democrats support the administration's position of admitting Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution. On February 2, he transmitted the Lecompton Constitution to Congress. He also transmitted a message that attacked the \"revolutionary government\" in Topeka, conflating them with the Mormons in Utah. Buchanan made every effort to secure congressional approval, offering favors, patronage appointments, and even cash for votes. The Lecompton Constitution won the approval of the Senate in March, but a combination of Know-Nothings, Republicans, and Northern Democrats defeated the bill in the House.\nBuchanan never forgave Douglas, as the Northern Democrats' rejection was the deciding factor in the House's decision, and he removed all Douglas supporters from his patronage in Illinois and Washington, D.C., installing pro-administration Democrats, including postmasters. Rather than accepting defeat, Buchanan backed the 1858 English Bill, which offered Kansas immediate statehood and vast public lands in exchange for accepting the Lecompton Constitution. In August 1858, Kansans by referendum strongly rejected the Lecompton Constitution. The territory received an abolitionist constitution, which was bitterly opposed in Congress by representatives and senators from the southern states until Kansas was admitted to the Union in January 1861.\nThe dispute over Kansas became the battlefront for control of the Democratic Party. On one side were Buchanan, the majority of Southern Democrats, and the \"doughfaces\". On the other side were Douglas and the majority of northern Democrats, as well as a few Southerners. Douglas's faction continued to support the doctrine of popular sovereignty, while Buchanan insisted that Democrats respect the Dred Scott decision and its repudiation of federal interference with slavery in the territories.\n\n1858 mid-term elections\nDouglas's Senate term was coming to an end in 1859, with the Illinois legislature, elected in 1858, determining whether Douglas would win re-election. The Senate seat was the primary issue of the legislative election, marked by the famous debates between Douglas and his Republican opponent for the seat, Abraham Lincoln. Buchanan, working through federal patronage appointees in Illinois, ran candidates for the legislature in competition with both the Republicans and the Douglas Democrats. This could easily have thrown the election to the Republicans, and showed the depth of Buchanan's animosity toward Douglas. In the end, Douglas Democrats won the legislative election and Douglas was re-elected to the Senate. In that year's elections, Douglas forces took control throughout the North, except in Buchanan's home state of Pennsylvania. Buchanan's support was otherwise reduced to a narrow base of southerners.\nThe division between northern and southern Democrats allowed the Republicans to win a plurality of the House in the 1858 elections, and allowed them to block most of Buchanan's agenda. Buchanan, in turn, added to the hostility with his veto of six substantial pieces of Republican legislation. Among these measures were the Homestead Act, which would have given 160 acres of public land to settlers who remained on the land for five years, and the Morrill Act, which would have granted public lands to establish land-grant colleges. Buchanan argued that these acts were unconstitutional. In the western and northwestern United States, where the Homestead Act was very popular, even many Democrats condemned the president's policies, while many Americans who considered education an important asset resented Buchanan's veto of agricultural colleges.\n\nForeign policy\nBuchanan took office with an ambitious foreign policy, designed to establish U.S. hegemony over Central America at the expense of Great Britain. Buchanan sought to revitalize Manifest Destiny and to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, which had been under attack from the Spanish, French, and especially the British in the 1850s. He hoped to re-negotiate the Clayton–Bulwer Treaty to counter European imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, which he thought limited U.S. influence in the region. He also sought to establish American protectorates over the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora to secure American citizens and investments, and most importantly, he hoped to achieve his long-term goal of acquiring Cuba. However, Buchanan's ambitions in Cuba and Mexico were largely blocked by the House of Representatives. After long negotiations with the British, he convinced them to cede the Bay Islands to Honduras and the Mosquito Coast to Nicaragua.\nIn 1858, Buchanan ordered the Paraguay expedition to punish Paraguay for firing on the USS Water Witch, ordering 2,500 marines and 19 warships there. This costly expedition took months to reach Asunción, which successfully resulted in a Paraguayan apology and payment of an indemnity. The chiefs of Raiatea and Tahaa in the South Pacific, refusing to accept the rule of King Tamatoa V, unsuccessfully petitioned the United States to accept the islands under a protectorate in June 1858. Buchanan also considered buying Alaska from the Russian Empire, as whaling in the waters there had become of great economic importance to the United States. Buchanan fueled this by spreading the rumor to the Russian ambassador Eduard de Stoeckl in December 1857 that a large amount of Mormons intended to emigrate to Russian Alaska. In the winter of 1859, an initial purchase offer of $5,000,000 (equivalent to $169,560,000 in 2023) was made. Although the project ultimately failed due to the reservations of Foreign Minister Alexander Gorchakov, the talks formed the basis for the later negotiations to purchase Alaska.\nBuchanan sought trade agreements with the Qing Dynasty and Japan. In China, his envoy William Bradford Reed succeeded in having the United States included as a party to the Treaty of Tianjin. In May 1860, Buchanan received a Japanese delegation consisting of several princes who carried the Harris Treaty negotiated by Townsend Harris for mutual ratification. Buchanan was offered a herd of elephants by King Rama IV of Siam, though the letter arrived after Buchanan's departure from office and Buchanan's successor Abraham Lincoln declined the offer stating that the U.S. had an unsuitable climate. Other presidential pets included a pair of bald eagles and a Newfoundland dog.\n\nCovode Committee\nIn March 1860, the House impaneled the Covode Committee to investigate the Buchanan administration's patronage system for alleged impeachable offenses, such as bribery and extortion of representatives. Buchanan supporters accused the committee, consisting of three Republicans and two Democrats, of being blatantly partisan, and claimed its chairman, Republican Rep. John Covode, was acting on a personal grudge stemming from a disputed land grant designed to benefit Covode's railroad company. The Democratic committee members, as well as Democratic witnesses, were enthusiastic in their condemnation of Buchanan.\nThe committee was unable to establish grounds for impeaching Buchanan; however, the majority report issued on June 17 alleged corruption and abuse of power among members of his cabinet. The committee gathered evidence that Buchanan had tried to bribe members of Congress in his favor through intermediaries in the spring of 1858 in connection with the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution of Kansas, and threatened their relatives with losing their posts if they did not vote in favor of the Lecompton Constitution. Witnesses also testified that the federal government used public funds to strengthen the intra-party faction of Douglas's opponents in Illinois. The Democrats pointed out that evidence was scarce, but did not refute the allegations; one of the Democratic members, Rep. James Robinson, stated that he agreed with the Republicans, though he did not sign it.\nThe public was shocked by the extent of the bribery, which affected all levels and agencies of government. Buchanan claimed to have \"passed triumphantly through this ordeal\" with complete vindication. Republican operatives distributed thousands of copies of the Covode Committee report throughout the nation as campaign material in that year's presidential election.\n\nElection of 1860\nAs he had promised in his inaugural address, Buchanan did not seek re-election. He went so far as to tell his ultimate successor, \"If you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland, you are a happy man.\"\nAt the 1860 Democratic National Convention in Charleston, the party split over the issue of slavery in the territories, damaging Buchanan's reputation as the main person responsible for this issue. Though Douglas led after every ballot, he was unable to win the two-thirds majority required. The convention adjourned after 53 ballots, and re-convened in Baltimore in June. After Douglas finally won the nomination, several Southerners refused to accept the outcome, and nominated Vice President Breckinridge as their own candidate. Douglas and Breckinridge agreed on most issues except the protection of slavery. Buchanan, nursing a grudge against Douglas, failed to reconcile the party, and tepidly supported Breckinridge. With the splintering of the Democratic Party, Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln won a four-way election that also included John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party. Lincoln's support in the North was enough to give him an Electoral College majority. Buchanan became the last Democrat to win a presidential election until Grover Cleveland in 1884.\nAs early as October, the army's Commanding General, Winfield Scott, an opponent of Buchanan, warned him that Lincoln's election would likely cause at least seven states to secede from the union. He recommended that massive amounts of federal troops and artillery be deployed to those states to protect federal property, although he also warned that few reinforcements were available. Since 1857, Congress had failed to heed calls for a stronger militia and allowed the army to fall into deplorable condition. Buchanan distrusted Scott and ignored his recommendations. After Lincoln's election, Buchanan directed Secretary of War John B. Floyd to reinforce southern forts with such provisions, arms, and men as were available; however, Floyd persuaded him to revoke the order.\n\nSecession\nWith Lincoln's victory, talk of secession and disunion reached a boiling point, putting the burden on Buchanan to address it in his final speech to Congress on December 10. In his message, which was anticipated by both factions, Buchanan denied the right of states to secede but maintained the federal government was without power to prevent them. He placed the blame for the crisis solely on \"intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States,\" and suggested that if they did not \"repeal their unconstitutional and obnoxious enactments ... the injured States, after having first used all peaceful and constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in revolutionary resistance to the Government of the Union.\" Buchanan's only suggestion to solve the crisis was \"an explanatory amendment\" affirming the constitutionality of slavery in the states, the fugitive slave laws, and popular sovereignty in the territories. His address was sharply criticized both by the North, for its refusal to stop secession, and the South, for denying its right to secede. Five days after the address was delivered, Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb resigned, as his views had become irreconcilable with the President's. Even as the formation of the Confederacy by the secessionist states became increasingly apparent in the winter of 1860, the president continued to surround himself with Southerners and ignore the Republicans.\n\nSouth Carolina, long the most radical Southern state, seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860. However, Unionist sentiment remained strong among many in the South, and Buchanan sought to appeal to the Southern moderates who might prevent secession in other states. He met with South Carolinian commissioners in an attempt to resolve the situation at Fort Sumter, which federal forces remained in control of despite its location in Charleston, South Carolina. Buchanan saw Congress, not himself, as responsible for finding a solution to the secession crisis. As a compromise for the southern states, Buchanan envisioned the adoption of amendments to the United States Constitution that would guarantee the right to slavery in the southern states and territories and strengthen the right of slave owners to reclaim escaped slaves as property in the northern states.\nHe refused to dismiss Interior Secretary Jacob Thompson after the latter was chosen as Mississippi's agent to discuss secession, and he refused to fire Secretary of War John B. Floyd despite an embezzlement scandal. Floyd ended up resigning, but not before sending numerous firearms to Southern states, where they eventually fell into the hands of the Confederacy. Despite Floyd's resignation, Buchanan continued to seek the advice of counselors from the Deep South, including Jefferson Davis and William Henry Trescot. Buchanan's friend Rose O'Neal Greenhow took advantage of the proximity to the president and spied for the Confederacy, which had already established a sophisticated network for gathering information from its eventual opponent before its formation.\nEfforts were made in vain by Sen. John J. Crittenden, Rep. Thomas Corwin, and former president John Tyler to negotiate a compromise to stop secession, with Buchanan's support. Failed attempts were also made by a group of governors meeting in New York. Buchanan secretly asked President-elect Lincoln to call for a national referendum on the issue of slavery, but Lincoln declined. In December 1860, when the second session of the 36th Congress was convened, The Committee of Thirty-Three was established by the House of Representatives to prevent further states from seceding. They proposed the Corwin Amendment, which would bar Congress from interfering with slavery in states. Despite opposition from Republicans, it passed both houses of Congress and was proposed to states for ratification, but it was never ratified by the requisite number of states.\nDespite the efforts of Buchanan and others, six more slave states seceded by the end of January 1861. Buchanan replaced the departed Southern cabinet members with John Adams Dix, Edwin M. Stanton, and Joseph Holt, all of whom were committed to preserving the Union. When Buchanan considered surrendering Fort Sumter, the new cabinet members threatened to resign, and Buchanan relented. On January 5, Buchanan decided to reinforce Fort Sumter, sending the Star of the West with 250 men and supplies. However, he failed to ask Major Robert Anderson to provide covering fire for the ship, and it was forced to return North without delivering troops or supplies. Buchanan chose not to respond to this act of war, and instead sought to find a compromise to avoid secession. He received a March 3 message from Anderson, that supplies were running low, but the response became Lincoln's to make, as the latter succeeded to the presidency the next day.\n\nStates admitted to the Union\nThree new states were admitted to the Union while Buchanan was in office:\n\nMinnesota – May 11, 1858\nOregon – February 14, 1859\nKansas – January 29, 1861\n\nFinal years and death (1861–1868)\nAfter leaving office, Buchanan retired to private life in Wheatland, where he spent most of his time in his study, reading books and writing letters. The Civil War erupted within two months of Buchanan's retirement. He supported the Union and the war effort, writing to former colleagues that, \"the assault upon Sumter was the commencement of war by the Confederate states, and no alternative was left but to prosecute it with vigor on our part.\" Buchanan supported Lincoln's introduction of universal conscription in the northern states, but was an opponent of his Emancipation Proclamation. Although he recognized constitutional violations in some of the president's executive orders, he never criticized them in public. He also wrote a letter to his fellow Pennsylvania Democrats in Harrisburg, urging them and all young men to enlist in the Union army and \"join the many thousands of brave & patriotic volunteers who are already in the field.\"\nBuchanan was dedicated to defending his actions prior to the Civil War, which was referred to by some as \"Buchanan's War\". He received hate mail and threatening letters daily, and stores in Lancaster displayed Buchanan's likeness with the eyes inked red, a noose drawn around his neck and the word \"TRAITOR\" written across his forehead. The Senate proposed a resolution of condemnation which ultimately failed, and newspapers accused him of colluding with the Confederacy. His former cabinet members, five of whom had been given jobs in the Lincoln administration, refused to defend Buchanan publicly.\nBuchanan became distraught by the vitriolic attacks levied against him, and fell sick and depressed. In October 1862, he defended himself in an exchange of letters with Winfield Scott, published in the National Intelligencer. He soon began writing his fullest public defense, in the form of his memoir Mr. Buchanan's Administration on the Eve of Rebellion, which was published in 1866, one year after the Civil War ended. Buchanan attributed secession to the \"malign influence\" of Republicans and the abolitionist movement. He discussed his foreign policy successes and expressed satisfaction with his decisions, even during the secession crisis. He blamed Robert Anderson, Winfield Scott, and Congress for the unresolved issue. Two years after the publication of the memoir, Buchanan caught a cold in May 1868, which quickly worsened due to his advanced age. He died on June 1, 1868, of respiratory failure at the age of 77 at his home at Wheatland. He was interred in Woodward Hill Cemetery in Lancaster.\n\nPolitical views\nBuchanan was often considered by anti-slavery northerners a \"doughface\", a northerner with pro-southern principles. Buchanan's sympathies for the Southern states went beyond political expediency for his path to the White House. He identified with cultural and social values that he found reflected in the honor code and lifestyle of the planter class and with which he increasingly came into contact in his retirement community beginning in 1834. Shortly after his election, he said that the \"great object\" of his administration was \"to arrest, if possible, the agitation of the Slavery question in the North and to destroy sectional parties\". Although Buchanan was personally opposed to slavery, he believed that the abolitionists were preventing the solution to the slavery problem. He stated, \"Before [the abolitionists] commenced this agitation, a very large and growing party existed in several of the slave states in favor of the gradual abolition of slavery; and now not a voice is heard there in support of such a measure. The abolitionists have postponed the emancipation of the slaves in three or four states for at least half a century.\" In deference to the intentions of the typical slaveholder, he was willing to provide the benefit of the doubt. In his third annual message to Congress, the president claimed that the slaves were \"treated with kindness and humanity. ... Both the philanthropy and the self-interest of the master have combined to produce this humane result.\"\n\nBuchanan thought restraint was the essence of good self-government. He believed the constitution comprised \"... restraints, imposed not by arbitrary authority, but by the people upon themselves and their representatives. ... In an enlarged view, the people's interests may seem identical, but to the eye of local and sectional prejudice, they always appear to be conflicting ... and the jealousies that will perpetually arise can be repressed only by the mutual forbearance which pervades the constitution.\" Regarding slavery and the Constitution, he stated: \"Although in Pennsylvania we are all opposed to slavery in the abstract, we can never violate the constitutional compact we have with our sister states. Their rights will be held sacred by us. Under the constitution it is their own question; and there let it remain.\"\nOne of the prominent issues of the day was tariffs. Buchanan was conflicted by free trade as well as prohibitive tariffs, since either would benefit one section of the country to the detriment of the other. As a senator from Pennsylvania, he said: \"I am viewed as the strongest advocate of protection in other states, whilst I am denounced as its enemy in Pennsylvania.\"\nBuchanan was also torn between his desire to expand the country for the general welfare of the nation, and to guarantee the rights of the people settling particular areas. On territorial expansion, he said, \"What, sir? Prevent the people from crossing the Rocky Mountains? You might just as well command the Niagara not to flow. We must fulfill our destiny.\" On the resulting spread of slavery, through unconditional expansion, he stated: \"I feel a strong repugnance by any act of mine to extend the present limits of the Union over a new slave-holding territory.\" For instance, he hoped the acquisition of Texas would \"be the means of limiting, not enlarging, the dominion of slavery.\"\n\nPersonal life\nBuchanan suffered from esotropia. In addition, one eye was short-sighted and the other far-sighted. To cover this, he bent his head forward and leaned it to one side during social interactions. This led to ridicule, which Henry Clay, among others, used ruthlessly during a congressional debate.\nIn 1818, Buchanan met Anne Caroline Coleman at a grand ball in Lancaster, and the two began courting. Anne was the daughter of the wealthy iron manufacturer Robert Coleman; Robert, like Buchanan's father, was from County Donegal in Ulster. Anne was also the sister-in-law of Philadelphia judge Joseph Hemphill, one of Buchanan's colleagues. By 1819, the two were engaged, but spent little time together. Buchanan was busy with his law firm and political projects during the Panic of 1819, which took him away from Coleman for weeks at a time. Rumors abounded, as some suggested that he was involved with other (unidentified) women. Letters from Coleman revealed she was aware of several rumors, and she accused him of only being interested in her money. She broke off the engagement, and soon afterward, on December 9, 1819, inexplicably died of \"hysterical convulsions\" resulting from an overdose of laudanum, at the age of 23. It was never established if the drug was taken by instruction, by accident, or by intent. Buchanan wrote to her father for permission to attend the funeral, which was refused. At the time of her funeral, he said that, \"I feel happiness has fled from me forever.\" Afterwards, Buchanan claimed that he remained unmarried out of devotion to his only love, who had died young.\n\nIn 1833 and the 1840s, he spoke of plans to marry, but these came to nothing and may merely have been due to his ambitions for a seat in the federal Senate or the White House. In the latter case, the aspirant was 19-year-old Anna Payne, the niece of former First Lady Dolley Madison. During his presidency, an orphaned niece, Harriet Lane, whom he had adopted, served as official White House hostess. There was an unfounded rumor that he had an affair with President Polk's widow, Sarah Childress Polk.\nBuchanan had a close relationship with William Rufus King, which became a popular target of gossip. King was an Alabama politician who briefly served as vice president under Franklin Pierce. Buchanan and King lived together in a Washington boardinghouse and attended social functions together from 1834 until 1844. Such a living arrangement was then common, though Buchanan once referred to the relationship as a \"communion\". Andrew Jackson mockingly called them \"Miss Nancy\" and \"Aunt Fancy\", the former being a 19th-century euphemism for an effeminate man. Buchanan's Postmaster General, Aaron V. Brown, also referred to King as \"Aunt Fancy\", as well as Buchanan's \"better half\", and \"wife\". King died of tuberculosis shortly after Pierce's inauguration, four years before Buchanan became president. Buchanan described him as \"among the best, the purest and most consistent public men I have known\". Biographer Baker opines that both men's nieces may have destroyed correspondence between the two men. However, she believes that their surviving letters illustrate only \"the affection of a special friendship\".\nBuchanan's lifelong bachelorhood after Anne Coleman's death has drawn interest and speculation. Some conjecture that Anne's death merely served to deflect questions about Buchanan's sexuality and bachelorhood. One of his biographers, Jean Baker, suggests that Buchanan was celibate, if not asexual. Several writers have surmised that he was homosexual, including James W. Loewen, Robert P. Watson, and Shelley Ross. Loewen indicated that Buchanan, late in life, wrote a letter acknowledging that he might marry a woman who could accept his \"lack of ardent or romantic affection\".\n\nLegacy\nHistorical reputation\nThough Buchanan predicted that \"history will vindicate my memory,\" historians have criticized Buchanan for his unwillingness or inability to act in the face of secession. Historical rankings of presidents of the United States without exception place Buchanan among the least successful presidents. When scholars are surveyed, he ranks at or near the bottom in terms of vision/agenda-setting, domestic leadership, foreign policy leadership, moral authority, and positive historical significance of their legacy. According to surveys taken by American scholars and political scientists between 1948 and 1982, Buchanan ranks every time among the worst presidents of the United States, alongside Harding, Fillmore and Nixon.\nBuchanan biographer Philip S. Klein focused in 1962, during the Civil Rights movement, upon challenges Buchanan faced:\n\nBuchanan assumed leadership ... when an unprecedented wave of angry passion was sweeping over the nation. That he held the hostile sections in check during these revolutionary times was in itself a remarkable achievement. His weaknesses in the stormy years of his presidency were magnified by enraged partisans of the North and South. His many talents, which in a quieter era might have gained for him a place among the great presidents, were quickly overshadowed by the cataclysmic events of civil war and by the towering Abraham Lincoln.\nBiographer Jean Baker is less charitable to Buchanan, saying in 2004:\n\nAmericans have conveniently misled themselves about the presidency of James Buchanan, preferring to classify him as indecisive and inactive ... In fact Buchanan's failing during the crisis over the Union was not inactivity, but rather his partiality for the South, a favoritism that bordered on disloyalty in an officer pledged to defend all the United States. He was that most dangerous of chief executives, a stubborn, mistaken ideologue whose principles held no room for compromise. His experience in government had only rendered him too self-confident to consider other views. In his betrayal of the national trust, Buchanan came closer to committing treason than any other president in American history.Other historians, such as Robert May, argued that his politics were \"anything but pro-slavery\", nevertheless, a very negative view is to be found in Michael Birkner's works about Buchanan. For Lori Cox Han, he ranks among scholars \"as either the worst president in [American] history or as part of a lowest ranking failure category\".\n\nMemorials\nA bronze and granite memorial near the southeast corner of Washington, D.C.'s Meridian Hill Park was designed by architect William Gorden Beecher and sculpted by Maryland artist Hans Schuler. It was commissioned in 1916 but not approved by the U.S. Congress until 1918, and not completed and unveiled until June 26, 1930. The memorial features a statue of Buchanan, bookended by male and female classical figures representing law and diplomacy, with engraved text reading: \"The incorruptible statesman whose walk was upon the mountain ranges of the law,\" a quote from a member of Buchanan's cabinet, Jeremiah S. Black.\n\nAn earlier monument was constructed in 1907–1908 and dedicated in 1911, on the site of Buchanan's birthplace in Stony Batter, Pennsylvania. Part of the original 18.5-acre (75,000 m2) memorial site is a 250-ton pyramid structure that stands on the site of the original cabin where Buchanan was born. The monument was designed to show the original weathered surface of the native rubble and mortar.\nThree counties are named in his honor, in Iowa, Missouri, and Virginia. Another in Texas was christened in 1858 but renamed Stephens County, after the newly elected vice president of the Confederate States of America, Alexander Stephens, in 1861. The city of Buchanan, Michigan, was also named after him. Several other communities are named after him: the unincorporated community of Buchanan, Indiana, the city of Buchanan, Georgia, the town of Buchanan, Wisconsin, and the townships of Buchanan Township, Michigan, and Buchanan, Missouri.\nJames Buchanan High School is a small, rural high school located on the outskirts of his childhood hometown, Mercersburg, Pennsylvania.\n\nPopular culture depictions\nBuchanan and his legacy are central to the film Raising Buchanan (2019). He is portrayed by René Auberjonois.\n\nSee also\nHistorical rankings of presidents of the United States\nList of presidents of the United States\nList of presidents of the United States by previous experience\nPresidents of the United States on U.S. postage stamps\nList of federal political sex scandals in the United States\n\nReferences\nWorks cited\nFurther reading\nExternal links\n\nUnited States Congress. \"James Buchanan (id: B001005)\". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.\nJames Buchanan: A Resource Guide from the Library of Congress\nThe James Buchanan papers, spanning the entirety of his legal, political and diplomatic career, are available for research use at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.\nUniversity of Virginia article: Buchanan biography\nWheatland\nJames Buchanan at Tulane University\nEssay on James Buchanan and his presidency from the Miller Center of Public Affairs\nBuchanan's Birthplace State Park, Franklin County, Pennsylvania\n\"Life Portrait of James Buchanan\", from C-SPAN's American Presidents: Life Portraits, June 21, 1999\nPrimary sources\n\nWorks by James Buchanan at Project Gutenberg\nWorks by James Buchanan at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) \nWorks by or about James Buchanan at the Internet Archive\nJames Buchanan Ill with Dysentery Before Inauguration: Original Letters Shapell Manuscript Foundation\nMr. Buchanans Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion. President Buchanans memoirs.\nInaugural Address Archived August 9, 2020, at the Wayback Machine\nFourth Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1860\n\nHarriet Rebecca Lane Johnston (May 9, 1830 – July 3, 1903) acted as first lady of the United States during the administration of her uncle, lifelong bachelor president James Buchanan, from 1857 to 1861. She has been described as the first of the modern first ladies, being a notably charming and diplomatic hostess, whose dress-styles were copied, and who promoted deserving causes. In her will, she left funds for a new school on the grounds of Washington National Cathedral. Several ships have been named in her honor, including the cutter USCGC Harriet Lane, still in service.\n\nStatus\nLane is the only person to have served as First Lady to a bachelor president, Buchanan being the only U.S. president never to have married. She is among 11 women who have served as First Lady, but were not married to the president, with most of the other women being relatives of widowed presidents.\n\nEarly life\nHarriet Lane's family was from Franklin County, Pennsylvania.  She was the youngest child of Elliott Tole Lane, a merchant, and Jane Ann Buchanan Lane. She lost her mother when she was nine; when her father's death two years later made her an orphan, she requested that her favorite uncle, James Buchanan, be appointed as her legal guardian. Buchanan, an unmarried Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, indulged his niece and her sister, enrolling them in boarding schools in Charles Town, Virginia (later for two years at the Georgetown Visitation Monastery in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C.) By this time, Buchanan was Secretary of State, and, as he had promised, he introduced her to fashionable and political circles.\nIn 1854, she joined him in London, where he was minister to the Court of St. James's. Queen Victoria gave \"dear Miss Lane\" the rank of ambassador's wife; admiring suitors gave her the fame of a beauty. In appearance \"Hal\" Lane was of medium height, with masses of light, almost golden-colored hair. She had eyes that were described as \"violet colored\".\n\nActing First Lady of the United States\nThe capital welcomed its new \"Democratic Queen\" to the White House in 1857. Harriet was a popular hostess during the four years of the Buchanan presidency. Women copied her hair and clothing styles (especially when she lowered the neckline on her inaugural gown by 2.5 inches), parents named their daughters for her, and a popular song (\"Listen to the Mockingbird\") was dedicated to her. While in the White House, she used her position to promote social causes, such as improving the living conditions of Native Americans in reservations. She also made a point of inviting artists and musicians to White House functions. For both her popularity and her advocacy work, she has been described as the first of the modern first ladies, and her popularity at the time is compared to that of Jacqueline Kennedy in the 1960s. The presidential yacht was named for her—the first of several ships to be named after her, one of which remains in service.\n\nAs sectional tensions increased, she worked out seating arrangements for her weekly formal dinner parties with special care, to give dignitaries their proper precedence and still keep political foes apart. Her tact did not falter, but her task became impossible—as did her uncle's. Seven states had seceded by the time Buchanan retired from office and returned with his niece to his spacious country home, Wheatland, near Lancaster, Pennsylvania.\nIn the 1982 Siena College Research Institute survey asking historians to assess American first ladies, Lane and several other \"acting\" first ladies were included. The first ladies survey, which has been conducted periodically since, ranks first ladies according to a cumulative score on the independent criteria of their background, value to the country, intelligence, courage, accomplishments, integrity, leadership, being their own women, public image, and value to the president. In the 1982 survey, out of 42 first ladies and acting first ladies, Lane was assessed as the 29th most highly regarded among historians. Acting first ladies such as Lane have been excluded from subsequent iterations of this survey.\n\nRomance and marriage\nDuring her time in England, Sir Fitzroy Kelly, then Prime Minister Palmerston's attorney general, proposed marriage to her; Queen Victoria was strongly in favor of this match, as it would keep Lane in England.\nLane considered the advantages of a number of bachelors. Her uncle cautioned Lane against \"rushing precipitately into matrimonial connections\" as his ward found her potential suitors \"pleasant but dreadfully troublesome\". Lane eventually married Baltimore banker Henry Elliott Johnston at the age of 36. They had two sons: James Buchanan Johnston (1866–1881) and Henry Elliot Johnston (1869–1882), but within the 18 years from 1867 to 1885, her uncle, her husband, and her children all died.\n\nLater life and death\nHarriet wrote her will in 1895 and lived another eight years, during which the country's general prosperity greatly increased the value of her estate. She added a codicil in 1899 directing that a school building be constructed on the grounds of the Washington National Cathedral property and asked that it be called the Lane-Johnston Building \"to the end that the family names of my husband and myself may be associated with the bequest made in loving memory of our sons.\" A codicil of 1903 increased her gift by one third but said that only half the total was to be spent on the building. The remainder was \"specially to provide for the free maintenance, education and training of choirboys, primarily those in service of the Cathedral.\" This bequest founded the prestigious boys' school that today is called St. Albans School, which opened in October 1909. \nAt Harriet Lane Johnston's funeral, services were conducted by Bishop Satterlee and Canon DeVries of the Washington National Cathedral. She was buried in Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore, Maryland, her grave marked with a Celtic cross like the Peace Cross on the cathedral close. In 1905, guests were invited to see the cornerstone of the first St. Albans School building, laid for what the invitation referred to as \"The Lane Johnston Choir School for Boys of the Washington Cathedral\".\n\nLegacy\nLane left bequests in her will that established a children's hospital and a boys' school, and she donated her collection of artwork to the Smithsonian. Several Navy and Coast Guard ships have been named in her honor.\nHer birthplace, the Lane House, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.\n\nHospital and school\nShe dedicated $400,000 (equivalent to $13,600,000 in 2023) to establish the Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland as a memorial to two sons who had died in childhood. In October 1912 the Harriet Lane Home officially opened. It was the first children's clinic in the United States that was associated with a medical school. Eventually treating over 60,000 children a year, the Harriet Lane Home became a pioneer treatment, teaching, and research clinic.\nFrom 1930 to 1963 Helen Taussig, who helped to develop the blue baby operation, headed the pediatric cardiac clinic. Child psychiatrist Leo Kanner did studies of autistic children. Lawson Wilkins established an endocrine clinic that developed procedures used universally to treat children with certain glandular disorders, including dwarfism. John E. Bordley and William G. Hardy broke ground in detecting hearing impairments in very young children. It became a renowned pediatric facility; the Harriet Lane Outpatient Clinics serve thousands of children today, and the widely used manual for pediatric house officers, The Harriet Lane Handbook, bears her name.\nThe Harriet Lane Outpatient Clinics continue to operate in countries throughout the world.\nThe pediatric medicine Harriet Lane Handbook series continues in print and online, with multiple titles. The original title (subtitled A Manual for Pediatric House Officers) is in its 22nd edition, published by Mosby.\n\nArt collection\nShe had an art collection based on European works which she left to the U.S. government. The Smithsonian Institution called her the \"First Lady of the National Collection of Fine Arts\" after her collection was accepted into public ownership.\n\nNamesake ships\nThe United States Coast Guard has had three cutters named in her honor. The first was the USRC Harriet Lane, commissioned into the United States Revenue Cutter Service (predecessor of the USCG) in 1857. This cutter was transferred to the United States Navy in 1861 because of the American Civil War.\nThe second cutter named for Harriet Lane was the 125 foot USCGC Harriet Lane (WSC-141), commissioned in 1926 and decommissioned in 1946.\nThe third cutter named for Harriet Lane is the USCGC Harriet Lane (WMEC-903). The cutter was commissioned in May 1984, and as of 2021, is still in active service.\n\nFootnotes\nReferences\nFurther reading\nBalcerski, Thomas J. \"Harriet Rebecca Lane Johnston.\" in A Companion to First Ladies (2016): 197-213.\nRosenberger, Homer Tope. \"To what Extent Did Harriet Lance Influence the Public Policies of James Buchanan?\" Lancaster County Historical Society, 1970. online\nUpdike, John (1974). Buchanan Dying (play). (Ms. Johnston is a character in Updike's fictional play about President Buchanan.)\n\nExternal links\nWorks by or about Harriet Lane at the Internet Archive\n\"Harriet Lane\". First Ladies: Influence & Image. firstladies.org. CNN.\n\nSince the office was established in 1789, 45 persons have served as president of the United States. Of these, eight have died in office: four were assassinated, and four died of natural causes. In each of these instances, the vice president has succeeded to the presidency. This practice is now governed by Section One of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1967, which declares that, \"the Vice President shall become President\" if the president is removed from office, dies, or resigns. The initial authorization for this practice was provided by Article II, Section 1, Clause 6, of the U.S. Constitution.\nThe first incumbent U.S. president to die was William Henry Harrison, on April 4, 1841, only one month after Inauguration Day. He died from complications of what at the time was believed to be pneumonia. The second American president to die in office, Zachary Taylor, died on July 9, 1850, from acute gastroenteritis. Abraham Lincoln was the first U.S. president to be killed while in office. He was shot by John Wilkes Booth on the night of April 14, 1865, and died the following morning. Sixteen years later, on July 2, 1881, James A. Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau, surviving for over two months before dying on September 19, 1881.\nOn September 14, 1901, William McKinley died, eight days after being shot by Leon Czolgosz. Next, Warren G. Harding suffered a heart attack, and died on August 2, 1923. On April 12, 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt (who had just begun his fourth term in office) collapsed and died as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage. The most recent U.S. president to die in office was John F. Kennedy, who was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.\n\n1841: William Henry Harrison\nOn March 26, 1841, William Henry Harrison became ill with a cold after being caught in a torrential downpour without cover. His symptoms grew progressively worse over the ensuing two days, at which time a team of doctors was called in to treat him. After making a diagnosis of right lower lobe pneumonia, they proceeded to place heated suction cups on his bare torso and to administer a series of bloodlettings, to supposedly draw out the disease. When those procedures failed to bring about improvement, the doctors treated him with ipecac, Castor oil, calomel, and finally with a boiled mixture of crude petroleum and Virginia snakeroot. All this only weakened Harrison further.\nInitially, no official announcement was made concerning Harrison's illness, which, the longer he remained out of public view, fueled public speculation and concern. By the end of the month large crowds were gathering outside the White House, holding vigil while awaiting any news about the president's condition. On the evening of April 4, 1841, nine days after becoming ill, and exactly one month after taking the oath of office, Harrison died at age 68. His last words were to his attending doctor, though assumed to be directed at Vice President John Tyler:\n\nSir, I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more.\nA 30-day period of mourning commenced following the president's death. Various public ceremonies, modeled after European royal funeral practices, were held. An invitation-only funeral service was also held, on April 7 in the East Room of the White House, after which Harrison's coffin was brought to Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., where it was placed in a temporary receiving vault.\nThat June, Harrison's body was transported by train and river barge to North Bend, Ohio. Then, on July 7, 1841, the nation's 9th president was buried in a family tomb at the summit of Mt. Nebo, overlooking the Ohio River – the William Henry Harrison Tomb State Memorial.\nHarrison's death sparked a brief constitutional crisis regarding succession to the presidency, as the U.S. Constitution was unclear as to whether Vice President John Tyler should assume the office of president or merely execute the duties of the vacant office. Tyler claimed a constitutional mandate to carry out the full powers and duties of the presidency and took the presidential oath of office, setting an important precedent for an orderly transfer of presidential power when a president leaves office intra-term.\nCoincidentally, all but one of the presidents who later died in office had, like Harrison, won a presidential election in a year ending in a zero (1840 through 1960). This pattern of tragedies came to be known as the Curse of Tippecanoe, or the Curse of Tecumseh, the name of the Shawnee leader against whom Harrison fought in the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe. Also sometimes referred to as the Zero Factor legend, the pattern was disrupted by Ronald Reagan, who survived an assassination attempt in 1981 (69 days after taking office) and lived to complete two full terms.\n\n1850: Zachary Taylor\nZachary Taylor was known to have consumed copious amounts of ice water, cold milk, green apples, and cherries on July 4, 1850, after attending holiday celebrations and the laying of the cornerstone of the Washington Monument. That same evening, he became severely ill with an unknown digestive ailment. Doctors used popular treatments of the time. On the morning of July 9, the president asked his wife Margaret not to grieve saying:\n\nI have always done my duty, I am ready to die. My only regret is for the friends I leave behind me.\nTaylor died late that evening, five days after becoming ill, at age 65. Contemporary reports listed the cause of death as \"bilious diarrhea or a bilious cholera.\" He was succeeded by Vice President Millard Fillmore.\nTaylor's funeral took place on July 13, and like Harrison's nine years earlier, was held in the East Room of the White House. Afterward, an estimated 100,000 people gathered along the funeral route to Congressional Cemetery where his coffin was placed temporarily in the Public Vault; that October it was transported to Louisville, Kentucky. On November 1, 1850, Taylor was buried in his family's burial ground on the Taylor estate, Springfield, which became the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery.\nAlmost immediately after his death, rumors began to circulate that Taylor had been poisoned by pro-slavery Southerners, and various conspiracy theories persisted into the late-20th century. The cause of Taylor's death was definitively established in 1991, when his remains were exhumed and an autopsy conducted by Kentucky's chief medical examiner. Subsequent neutron activation analysis conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory revealed no evidence of poisoning, as arsenic levels were too low. The analysis concluded Taylor had contracted cholera morbus (acute gastroenteritis), as Washington had open sewers, and his food or drink may have been contaminated.\n\n1865: Abraham Lincoln\nThe assassination of Abraham Lincoln took place on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, as the Civil War was drawing to a close. He died the following morning at the age of 56. The assassination occurred five days after General Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant and the Army of the Potomac following the Battle of Appomattox Court House. Lincoln was the first American president to be killed by an assassin. (The first U.S. president to be confronted by a would-be assassin was Andrew Jackson 30 years earlier, in January 1835.)\nThe assassination of President Lincoln was planned and carried out by the well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, vehement in his denunciation of Lincoln, and a strong opponent of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Booth and a group of co-conspirators originally plotted to kidnap Lincoln, but later planned to kill him, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward in a bid to help the Confederacy's cause. Johnson's would-be-assassin, George Atzerodt did not carry out his part of the plan, and Johnson succeeded Lincoln as president while Lewis Powell only managed to wound Seward.\nLincoln was shot once in the back of his head while watching the play Our American Cousin with his wife Mary Todd Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on the night of April 14, 1865. An army surgeon who happened to be at Ford's, Doctor Charles Leale, assessed Lincoln's wound as mortal. The unconscious president was then carried across the street from the theater to the Petersen House, where he remained in a coma for eight hours before dying the following morning.\nWithin two weeks of the manhunt for Lincoln's killers, on April 26, 1865, Booth and David Herold were caught in a tobacco barn in Port Conway, Virginia. While Herold surrendered, Booth was shot to death by Boston Corbett, a Union Corporal.\nA three-week series of official functions were held following the president's death. He lay in state in the East Room of the White House which was open to the public on April 18. A funeral service was held the next day, and then the coffin was transported in a procession down Pennsylvania Avenue to the United States Capitol, where a ceremonial burial service was held in the rotunda. After lying in state at the Capitol, Lincoln's remains were transported by train to Springfield, Illinois, for burial. He was interred on May 4, 1865, at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield – the Lincoln Tomb State Historic Site since 1895.\n\n1881: James A. Garfield\nThe assassination of James A. Garfield happened in Washington, D.C., on July 2, 1881. Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau at 9:30 a.m., less than four months into his term as the nation's 20th president. He died 11 weeks later on September 19, 1881, at the age of 49. Vice President Chester A. Arthur succeeded him as president. Garfield was scheduled to leave Washington on July 2, 1881, for his summer vacation. On that day, Guiteau lay in wait for the president at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station, on the southwest corner of present-day Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, D.C.\nPresident Garfield came to the Sixth Street Station on his way to his alma mater, Williams College, where he was scheduled to deliver a speech. Garfield was accompanied by two of his sons, James and Harry, and Secretary of State James G. Blaine. Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln waited at the station to see the president off. Garfield had no bodyguard or security detail; with the exception of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, early U.S. presidents never used any guards.\nAs President Garfield entered the waiting room of the station, Guiteau stepped forward and pulled the trigger from behind at point-blank range. \"My God, what is that?!\" Garfield cried out, flinging up his arms. Guiteau fired again and Garfield collapsed. One bullet grazed Garfield's shoulder; the other hit him in the back, passing the first lumbar vertebra but missing the spinal cord before coming to rest behind his pancreas.\nGarfield, conscious but in shock, was carried to an upstairs floor of the train station. Lincoln sent for D.C. Bliss, a prominent Washington physician, who soon arrived and examined Garfield's wounds several times, probing for the bullet that remained lodged in the president's body with his fingers and metal probes. Two additional doctors were summoned, and they also probed the entry wound. Eventually there were about twenty people in the room, including at least ten physicians. As Garfield was being cared for, Lincoln, thinking back to the death of his father, said \"How many hours of sorrow I have passed in this town.\"\nGarfield was carried back to the White House. Although doctors told him that he would not survive the night, the president remained conscious and alert. The next morning his vital signs were good and doctors began to hope for recovery. A long vigil began, with Garfield's doctors issuing regular bulletins that the American public followed closely throughout the summer of 1881. His condition fluctuated. Fevers came and went. Garfield struggled to keep down solid food and spent most of the summer eating little, and that only liquids.\nGarfield had been a regular visitor to the shore town of Long Branch, New Jersey, one of the nation's premier summer vacation spots until World War I. In early September, it was decided to bring him to Elberon, a quiet beach town just to the south of Long Branch, in hopes that the beach air would help him recover. When they heard that the president was being brought to their town, local citizens built more than half a mile of tracks in less than 24 hours, enabling Garfield to be brought directly to the door of the oceanfront Franklyn cottage, rather than being moved by carriage from the local Elberon train station. However, Garfield died 12 days later. A granite marker on Garfield Road identifies the former site of the cottage, which was demolished in 1950. Throughout the five-month drama, anxious Americans across the country were kept informed of developments by the news media. The publisher of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Miriam Leslie, was especially quick to publish fully illustrated accounts of key moments, from Garfield's shooting to the embalming of his body.\nChester Arthur was at his home in New York City on the night of September 19, when word came that Garfield had died. After first getting the news, Arthur said \"I hope—my God, I do hope it is a mistake.\" But confirmation by telegram came soon after. Arthur took the presidential oath of office, administered by a New York Supreme Court judge, then left for Long Branch to pay his respects before traveling on to Washington. Garfield's body was taken to Washington, where it lay in state for two days in the Capitol Rotunda before being taken to Cleveland, where the funeral was held on September 26.\nWhen the tracks that had been hastily built to the Franklyn cottage were later torn up, actor Oliver Byron bought the wooden ties, and had local carpenter William Presley build them into a small tea house, in commemoration of the president. The red & white (originally red, white & blue) \"Garfield Tea House\" still survives, resting a couple of blocks away from the site of the cottage on the grounds of the Long Branch Historical Museum, a former Episcopal Church. The church is nicknamed \"The Church of the Presidents,\" as it had been attended by, in addition to Garfield, presidents Chester A. Arthur, Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison, Rutherford Hayes, William McKinley, and Woodrow Wilson, during their own visits to Long Branch.\n\n1901: William McKinley\nWilliam McKinley was assassinated on September 6, 1901, inside the Temple of Music on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley was shaking hands with the public when Leon Czolgosz, a Polish-American anarchist, shot him. The 58-year-old president died eight days later on September 14 from gangrene caused by the bullet wounds.\nMcKinley had been elected for a second term in 1900. He enjoyed meeting the public, and was reluctant to accept the security available to his office. The secretary to the president, George B. Cortelyou, feared an assassination attempt would take place during a visit to the Temple of Music, and twice took it off the schedule. McKinley restored it each time.\nCzolgosz had lost his job during the economic Panic of 1893 and turned to anarchism, a political philosophy whose adherents had previously killed foreign leaders. Regarding McKinley as a symbol of oppression, Czolgosz felt it was his duty as an anarchist to kill him. Unable to get near McKinley during the earlier part of the presidential visit, Czolgosz shot McKinley twice as the President reached to shake his hand in the reception line at the temple. One bullet grazed McKinley; the other entered his abdomen and was never found.\nMcKinley initially appeared to be recovering, but took a turn for the worse on September 13 as his wounds became gangrenous, and died early the next morning; Vice President Theodore Roosevelt succeeded him. Roosevelt was hiking near the top of Mt. Marcy, in New York's Adirondack region, when a runner located him to convey the news. After McKinley's murder, for which Czolgosz was put to death in the electric chair, the United States Congress passed legislation to officially charge the Secret Service with the responsibility for protecting the president.\n\n1923: Warren G. Harding\nWarren G. Harding died from a sudden heart attack in his hotel suite while visiting San Francisco on the evening of August 2, 1923, at the age of 57. His death quickly led to theories that he had been poisoned or committed suicide. Rumors of poisoning were fueled, in part, by a book called The Strange Death of President Harding by private detective and former Ohio Gang member Gaston Means, who suggested  First Lady Florence Harding had poisoned her husband after learning of his infidelity. Mrs. Harding's refusal to allow an autopsy on President Harding only added to the speculation. According to the physicians attending Harding, however, the symptoms in the days prior to his death all pointed to congestive heart failure. Harding's biographer, Samuel H. Adams, concluded that \"Warren G. Harding died a natural death which, in any case, could not have been long postponed.\"\nImmediately after President Harding's death, Mrs. Harding returned to Washington, D.C., and briefly stayed in the White House with the new president Calvin Coolidge and first lady. For a month, former first lady Harding gathered and destroyed by fire President Harding's correspondence and documents, both official and unofficial. Upon her return to Marion, Ohio, Mrs. Harding hired a number of secretaries to collect and burn President Harding's personal papers. According to Mrs. Harding, she took these actions to protect her husband's legacy. The remaining papers were held and kept from public view by the Harding Memorial Association in Marion.\n\n1945: Franklin D. Roosevelt\nOn March 29, 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt went to the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, to rest before his anticipated appearance at the founding conference of the United Nations in late April in San Francisco. At around 1:00 pm on April 12, Roosevelt said, \"I have a terrific pain in the back of my head,\" which were his last words. He then slumped forward in his chair, unconscious, and was carried into his bedroom. The president's attending cardiologist, Howard Bruenn, diagnosed a massive cerebral hemorrhage (stroke). The 63-year-old Roosevelt died a few hours later, without regaining consciousness. As Allen Drury later said, \"so ended an era, and so began another.\" After Roosevelt's death, an editorial in The New York Times declared, \"Men will thank God on their knees a hundred years from now that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House.\"\nIn his later years at the White House, when Roosevelt was increasingly overworked, his daughter Anna Roosevelt Boettiger had moved in to provide her father companionship and support. Anna had also arranged for her father to meet with his former mistress, the then widowed Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. A close friend of both Roosevelt and Mercer who was present, Elizabeth Shoumatoff, rushed Mercer away to avoid negative publicity and implications of infidelity. When Eleanor heard about her husband's death, she was also faced with the news that Anna had been arranging these meetings with Mercer and that Mercer had been with Franklin when he died.\nOn the morning of April 13, Roosevelt's body was placed in a flag-draped coffin and loaded onto the presidential train. After a White House funeral on April 14, Roosevelt was transported back to Hyde Park by train, guarded by four servicemen, one each from the Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard. As was his wish, Roosevelt was buried in the Rose Garden of the Springwood estate, the Roosevelt family home in Hyde Park on April 15. Eleanor died in November 1962 and was buried next to him.\nRoosevelt's death was met with shock and grief across the U.S. and around the world. His declining health had not been known to the general public. Roosevelt had been president for more than 12 years, longer than any other person, and had led the country through some of its greatest crises to the impending defeat of Nazi Germany and within sight of the defeat of Japan as well.\nLess than a month after his death, on May 8, the war in Europe ended. President Harry S. Truman dedicated Victory in Europe Day and its celebrations to Roosevelt's memory, and kept the flags across the U.S. at half-staff for the remainder of the 30-day mourning period. In doing so, Truman said that his only wish was \"that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to witness this day.\"\n\n1963: John F. Kennedy\nThe most recent U.S. president to die in office is John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. He was fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, who fired three shots from a sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository at 12:30 p.m. as the presidential motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza. Riding in the vehicle with the president were First Lady Jackie Kennedy, Texas governor John Connally, and Connally's wife Nellie; Governor Connally was also seriously wounded in the attack. The motorcade rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead about 30 minutes later, at the age of 46. Connally recovered from his injuries.\nVice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was a few cars behind the president in the motorcade, became U.S. president upon Kennedy's death. He took the presidential oath of office onboard Air Force One as it sat on the runway at Dallas Love Field. Oswald was arrested by the Dallas Police Department that afternoon, and was charged under Texas state law with the murder of Kennedy, as well as that of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit, who had been fatally shot a short time after the assassination. Two days later, on November 24, 1963, as live television cameras were covering his transfer from the city jail to the county jail, Oswald was fatally shot in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters by Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby. Ruby was convicted of Oswald's murder, though it was later overturned on appeal, and Ruby died in prison in 1967 while awaiting a new trial.\nIn 1964, after a 10-month investigation into the assassination, the Warren Commission concluded that President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald and that Oswald had acted entirely alone. It also concluded that Jack Ruby acted alone when he killed Oswald in police custody. Nonetheless, speculation over \"what really happened\" on November 22, 1963, in Dallas captured the public imagination during the decades that followed. Polls conducted from 1966 to 2004 found that as many as 80 percent of Americans have suspected that there was a criminal conspiracy or cover-up. Numerous books, films, television specials and websites have examined the assassination in minute detail, and numerous conspiracy theories have been advanced. Parties as varied as the FBI, the CIA, the Mafia, the Cuban and the Soviet governments, along with Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, have been identified as Suspect. In an article published prior to the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination, author Vincent Bugliosi estimates that a total of 42 groups, 82 assassins, and 214 people have been accused in conspiracy theories challenging the \"lone gunman\" theory.\n\nSee also\nList of United States presidential assassination attempts\nCurse of Tippecanoe\n\nNotes\nReferences\nBibliography\nBauer, K. Jack (1985). Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 0-8071-1237-2.\nCleaves, Freeman (1939). Old Tippecanoe: William Henry Harrison and His Time. New York, NY: C. Scribner's Sons.\nLeech, Margaret (1959). In the Days of McKinley. New York: Harper and Brothers. pp. 594–600. OCLC 456809.\nMcCullough, David (1992). Truman. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-86920-5.\nMillard, Candice (2011). Destiny of the Republic. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-53500-7.\nMiller, Scott (2011). The President and the Assassin. New York: Random House. pp. 56–60. ISBN 978-1-4000-6752-7.\nPeskin, Allan (1978). Garfield. Kent State University Press. ISBN 0-87338-210-2.\nVowell, Sarah (2005). Assassination Vacation. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-6003-1.\n\nExternal links\nThe Mortal Presidency Archived June 3, 2015, at the Wayback Machine (Shapell Manuscript Foundation)\n\nJames Abram Garfield (November 19, 1831 – September 19, 1881) was the 20th president of the United States, serving from March 1881 until his assassination in September that year. A preacher, lawyer, and Civil War general, Garfield served nine terms in the United States House of Representatives and is the only sitting member of the House to be elected president. Before his candidacy for the presidency, he had been elected to the U.S. Senate by the Ohio General Assembly—a position he declined when he became president-elect.\nGarfield was born into poverty in a log cabin and grew up in northeastern Ohio. After graduating from Williams College, he studied law and became an attorney. He was a preacher in the Stone–Campbell Movement and president of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, affiliated with the Disciples. Garfield was elected as a Republican member of the Ohio State Senate in 1859, serving until 1861. He opposed Confederate secession, was a major general in the Union Army during the American Civil War, and fought in the battles of Middle Creek, Shiloh, and Chickamauga. He was elected to Congress in 1862 to represent Ohio's 19th district. Throughout his congressional service, he firmly supported the gold standard and gained a reputation as a skilled orator. He initially agreed with Radical Republican views on Reconstruction but later favored a Moderate Republican–aligned approach to civil rights enforcement for freedmen. Garfield's aptitude for mathematics extended to his own proof of the Pythagorean theorem, which he published in 1876.\nAt the 1880 Republican National Convention, delegates chose Garfield, who had not sought the White House, as a compromise presidential nominee on the 36th ballot. In the 1880 presidential election, he conducted a low-key front porch campaign and narrowly defeated the Democratic nominee, Winfield Scott Hancock. Garfield's accomplishments as president included his assertion of presidential authority against senatorial courtesy in executive appointments, a purge of corruption in the Post Office, and his appointment of a Supreme Court justice. He advocated for agricultural technology, an educated electorate, and civil rights for African Americans. He also proposed substantial civil service reforms, which were passed by Congress in 1883 as the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act and signed into law by his successor, Chester A. Arthur.\nGarfield was a member of the intraparty \"Half-Breed\" faction who used the powers of the presidency to defy the powerful \"Stalwart\" Senator Roscoe Conkling from New York. He did this by appointing Blaine faction leader William H. Robertson to the lucrative post of Collector of the Port of New York. The ensuing political battle resulted in Robertson's confirmation and the resignations of Conkling and Thomas C. Platt from the Senate.\nOn July 2, 1881, Charles J. Guiteau, a disappointed and delusional office seeker, shot Garfield at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington. The wound was not immediately fatal, but an infection caused by his doctors' unsanitary methods in treating the wound killed Garfield on September 19. Due to his brief tenure in office, historians tend to rank Garfield as a below-average president, though he has earned praise for anti-corruption and pro-civil rights stances.\n\nChildhood and early life\nJames Abram Garfield was born the youngest of five children on November 19, 1831, in a log cabin in Orange Township, now Moreland Hills, Ohio. Garfield's ancestor Edward Garfield migrated from Hillmorton, Warwickshire, England, to Massachusetts around 1630. James's father Abram was born in Worcester, New York, and came to Ohio to woo his childhood sweetheart, Mehitabel Ballou, only to find her married. He instead wed her sister Eliza, who was born in New Hampshire. James was named after an earlier son of Eliza and Abram who had died in infancy.\nIn early 1833, Abram and Eliza Garfield joined a Stone-Campbell church, a decision that influenced their youngest son's life. Abram died later that year, and James was raised in poverty in a household led by his strong-willed mother. He was her favorite child and the two remained close for the rest of his life. Eliza remarried in 1842, but soon left her second husband, Warren (or Alfred) Belden, and a scandalous divorce was awarded in 1850. James took his mother's side in the matter and noted Belden's 1880 death with satisfaction in his diary. Garfield also enjoyed his mother's stories about his ancestry, especially those about his Welsh great-great-grandfathers and an ancestor who served as a knight of Caerphilly Castle.\nPoor and fatherless, Garfield was mocked by his peers and became sensitive to slights throughout his life; he sought escape through voracious reading. He left home at age 16 in 1847 and was rejected for work on the only ship in port in Cleveland. Garfield instead found work on a canal boat, managing the mules that pulled it. Horatio Alger later used this labor to good effect when he wrote Garfield's campaign biography in 1880.\nAfter six weeks, illness forced Garfield to return home, and during his recuperation, his mother and a local school official secured his promise to forgo canal work for a year of school. In 1848, he began at Geauga Seminary, in nearby Chester Township, Geauga County, Ohio. Garfield later said of his childhood, \"I lament that I was born to poverty, and in this chaos of childhood, seventeen years passed before I caught any inspiration ... a precious 17 years when a boy with a father and some wealth might have become fixed in manly ways.\"\n\nEducation, marriage and early career\nGarfield attended Geauga Seminary from 1848 to 1850 and learned academic subjects for which he had not previously had time. He excelled as a student and was especially interested in languages and elocution. He began to appreciate the power a speaker had over an audience, writing that the speaker's platform \"creates some excitement. I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error.\" Geauga was coeducational, and Garfield was attracted to one of his classmates, Lucretia Rudolph, whom he later married. To support himself at Geauga, he worked as a carpenter's assistant and teacher. The need to go from town to town to find work as a teacher aggravated Garfield, and he developed a dislike of what he called \"place-seeking\", which became, he said, \"the law of my life.\" In later years, he astounded his friends by disregarding positions that could have been his with little politicking. Garfield had attended church more to please his mother than to worship God, but in his late teens he underwent a religious awakening. He attended many camp meetings, which led to his being born again on March 4, 1850, when he was baptized into Christ by being submerged in the icy waters of the Chagrin River.\nAfter he left Geauga, Garfield worked for a year at various jobs, including teaching jobs. Finding that some New Englanders worked their way through college, Garfield determined to do the same and sought a school that could prepare him for the entrance examinations. From 1851 to 1854, he attended the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (later named Hiram College) in Hiram, Ohio, a school founded by and still affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). While there, he was most interested in the study of Greek and Latin but was inclined to learn about and discuss any new thing he encountered. Securing a position on entry as janitor, he obtained a teaching position while he was still a student there. Lucretia Rudolph also enrolled at the Institute and Garfield wooed her while teaching her Greek. He developed a regular preaching circuit at neighboring churches and, in some cases, earned one gold dollar per service. By 1854, Garfield had learned all the Institute could teach him and was a full-time teacher. Garfield then enrolled at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, as a third-year student; he received credit for two years' study at the Institute after passing a cursory examination. Garfield was also impressed with the college president, Mark Hopkins, who had responded warmly to Garfield's letter inquiring about admission. He said of Hopkins, \"The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log with a student on the other.\" Hopkins later said of Garfield in his student days, \"There was a large general capacity applicable to any subject. There was no pretense of genius, or alternation of spasmodic effort, but a satisfactory accomplishment in all directions.\" After his first term, Garfield was hired to teach penmanship to the students of nearby Pownal, Vermont, a post Chester A. Arthur previously held.\n\nGarfield graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Williams in August 1856, was named salutatorian, and spoke at the commencement. His biographer Ira Rutkow writes that Garfield's years at Williams gave him the opportunity to know and respect those of different social backgrounds, and that, despite his origin as an unsophisticated Westerner, socially conscious New Englanders liked and respected him. \"In short,\" Rutkow writes, \"Garfield had an extensive and positive first experience with the world outside the Western Reserve of Ohio.\"\nUpon his return to Ohio, the degree from a prestigious Eastern college made Garfield a man of distinction. He returned to Hiram to teach at the Institute and in 1857 was made its principal, though he did not see education as a field that would realize his full potential. The abolitionist atmosphere at Williams had enlightened him politically, after which he began to consider politics as a career. He campaigned for Republican presidential candidate John C. Frémont in 1856. In 1858, he married Lucretia, and they had seven children, five of whom survived infancy. Soon after the wedding, he registered to read law at the office of attorney Albert Gallatin Riddle in Cleveland, though he did his studying in Hiram. He was admitted to the bar in 1861.\nLocal Republican leaders invited Garfield to enter politics upon the death of Cyrus Prentiss, the presumptive nominee for the local state senate seat. He was nominated at the party convention on the sixth ballot and was elected, serving from 1860 to 1861. Garfield's major effort in the state senate was an unsuccessful bill providing for Ohio's first geological survey to measure its mineral resources.\n\nCivil War\nAfter Abraham Lincoln's election as president, several Southern states announced their secession from the Union to form a new government, the Confederate States of America. Garfield read military texts while anxiously awaiting the war effort, which he regarded as a holy crusade against the Slave Power. In April 1861, the rebels bombarded Fort Sumter, one of the South's last federal outposts, beginning the Civil War. Although he had no military training, Garfield knew his place was in the Union Army.\nAt Governor William Dennison's request, Garfield deferred his military ambitions to remain in the legislature, where he helped appropriate the funds to raise and equip Ohio's volunteer regiments. When the legislature adjourned Garfield spent the spring and early summer on a speaking tour of northeastern Ohio, encouraging enlistment in the new regiments. Following a trip to Illinois to purchase muskets, Garfield returned to Ohio and, in August 1861, received a commission as a colonel in the 42nd Ohio Infantry regiment. The 42nd Ohio existed only on paper, so Garfield's first task was to fill its ranks. He did so quickly, recruiting many of his neighbors and former students. The regiment traveled to Camp Chase, outside Columbus, Ohio, to complete training. In December, Garfield was ordered to bring the 42nd to Kentucky, where they joined the Army of the Ohio under Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell.\n\nBuell's command\nBuell quickly assigned Garfield the task of driving Confederate forces out of eastern Kentucky, giving him the 18th Brigade for the campaign, which, besides his own 42nd, included the 40th Ohio Infantry, two Kentucky infantry regiments and two cavalry units. They departed Catlettsburg, Kentucky, in mid-December, advancing through the valley of the Big Sandy River. The march was uneventful until Union forces reached Paintsville, Kentucky, on January 6, 1862, where Garfield's cavalry engaged the rebels at Jenny's Creek. Confederate troops under Brigadier General Humphrey Marshall held the town in numbers roughly equal to Garfield's own, but Garfield positioned his troops so as to deceive Marshall into believing the rebels were outnumbered. Marshall ordered his troops to withdraw to the forks of Middle Creek, on the road to Virginia, and Garfield ordered his troops to take up the pursuit. They attacked the rebel positions on January 9, 1862, in the Battle of Middle Creek, the only pitched battle Garfield commanded personally. At the fighting's end, the Confederates withdrew from the field and Garfield sent his troops to Prestonsburg to reprovision.\n\nIn recognition of his success, Garfield was promoted to brigadier general. After Marshall's retreat, Garfield's command was the sole remaining Union force in eastern Kentucky and he announced that any men who had fought for the Confederacy would be granted amnesty if they returned to their homes, lived peaceably, and remained loyal to the Union. The proclamation was surprisingly lenient, as Garfield now believed the war was a crusade for eradication of slavery. Following a brief skirmish at Pound Gap, the last rebel units in the area were outflanked and retreated to Virginia.\nGarfield's promotion gave him command of the 20th Brigade of the Army of the Ohio, which received orders to join Major General Ulysses S. Grant's forces as they advanced on Corinth, Mississippi, in early 1862. Before the 20th Brigade arrived, however, Confederate forces under General Albert Sidney Johnston surprised Grant's men in their camps, driving them back. Garfield's troops received word of the battle and advanced quickly, joining the rest of the army on the second day to drive the Confederates back across the field and into retreat. The action, later known as the Battle of Shiloh, was the bloodiest of the war to date; Garfield was exposed to fire for much of the day, but emerged uninjured. Major General Henry W. Halleck, Grant's superior, took charge of the combined armies and advanced ponderously toward Corinth; when they arrived, the Confederates had fled.\nThat summer, Garfield suffered from jaundice and significant weight loss. He was forced to return home, where his wife nursed him back to health. While he was home, Garfield's friends worked to gain him the Republican nomination for Congress, but he refused to campaign with the delegates. He returned to military duty that autumn and went to Washington to await his next assignment. During this period of idleness, a rumor of an extramarital affair caused friction in the Garfields' marriage until Lucretia eventually chose to overlook it. Garfield repeatedly received tentative assignments that were quickly withdrawn, to his frustration. In the meantime, he served on the court-martial of Fitz John Porter for his tardiness at the Second Battle of Bull Run. He was convinced of Porter's guilt and voted with his fellow generals to convict Porter. The trial lasted almost two months, from November 1862 to January 1863, and, by its end, Garfield had procured an assignment as chief of staff to Major General William S. Rosecrans.\n\nChief of staff for Rosecrans\nGenerals' chiefs of staff were usually more junior officers, but Garfield's influence with Rosecrans was greater than usual, with duties extending beyond communication of orders to actual management of his Army of the Cumberland. Rosecrans had a voracious appetite for conversation, especially when unable to sleep; in Garfield, he found \"the first well read person in the Army\" and the ideal candidate for discussions that ran deep into the night. They discussed everything, especially religion, and the two became close despite Garfield's being 12 years his junior. Rosecrans, who had converted from Methodism to Roman Catholicism, softened Garfield's view of his faith.\nGarfield recommended that Rosecrans replace wing commanders Alexander McCook and Thomas Crittenden, as he believed they were ineffective, but Rosecrans ignored the suggestion. With Rosecrans, Garfield devised the Tullahoma Campaign to pursue and trap Confederate General Braxton Bragg in Tullahoma. After initial Union success, Bragg retreated toward Chattanooga, where Rosecrans stalled and requested more troops and supplies. Garfield argued for an immediate advance, in line with demands from Halleck and Lincoln. After a council of war and lengthy deliberations, Rosecrans agreed to attack.\nAt the ensuing Battle of Chickamauga on September 19 and 20, 1863, confusion among the wing commanders over Rosecrans's orders created a gap in the lines, resulting in a rout of the right flank. Rosecrans concluded that the battle was lost and fell back on Chattanooga to establish a defensive line. Garfield, however, thought part of the army had held and, with Rosecrans's approval, headed across Missionary Ridge to survey the scene. Garfield's hunch was correct. Consequently, his ride became legendary and Rosecrans's error reignited criticism about the latter's leadership. While Rosecrans's army had avoided disaster, they were stranded in Chattanooga, surrounded by Bragg's army. Garfield sent a telegram to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton alerting Washington to the need for reinforcements to avoid annihilation. Lincoln and Halleck responded to the request for reinforcements by sending 20,000 troops to Garfield by rail within nine days. In the meantime, Grant was promoted to command of the western armies and quickly replaced Rosecrans with George H. Thomas. Garfield was ordered to report to Washington, where he was promoted to major general. According to historian Jean Edward Smith, Grant and Garfield had a \"guarded relationship\" since Grant promoted Thomas, rather than Garfield, to command of the Army of the Cumberland after Rosecrans's dismissal.\n\nCongressional career\nElection in 1862; Civil War years\nWhile he served in the Army in early 1862, friends of Garfield approached him about running for Congress from Ohio's newly redrawn and heavily Republican 19th district. He worried that he and other state-appointed generals would receive obscure assignments, and running for Congress would allow him to resume his political career. That the new Congress would not hold its first regular session until December 1863 allowed him to continue his war service for a time. Home on medical leave, he refused to campaign for the nomination, leaving that to political managers who secured it at the local convention in September 1862 on the eighth ballot. In the October general election, he defeated D.B. Woods by a two-to-one margin for a seat in the 38th Congress.\nDays before his Congressional term began, Garfield lost his eldest daughter, three-year-old Eliza, and became anxious and conflicted, saying his \"desolation of heart\" might require his return to \"the wild life of the army.\" He also assumed that the war would end before his joining the House, but it had not, and he felt strongly that he belonged in the field, rather than in Congress. He also thought he could expect a favorable command, so he decided to see President Lincoln. During their meeting, Lincoln recommended he take his House seat, as there was an excess of generals and a shortage of administration congressmen, especially those with knowledge of military affairs. Garfield accepted this recommendation and resigned his military commission to do so.\nGarfield met and befriended Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, who saw Garfield as a younger version of himself. The two agreed politically and both were part of the Radical wing of the Republican Party. Once he took his seat in December 1863, Garfield was frustrated at Lincoln's reluctance to press the South hard. Many radicals, led in the House by Pennsylvania's Thaddeus Stevens, wanted rebel-owned lands confiscated, but Lincoln threatened to veto any bill that proposed to do so on a widespread basis. In debate on the House floor, Garfield supported such legislation and, discussing England's Glorious Revolution, hinted that Lincoln might be thrown out of office for resisting it. Garfield had supported Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and marveled at the \"strange phenomenon in the world's history, when a second-rate Illinois lawyer is the instrument to utter words which shall form an epoch memorable in all future ages.\"\nGarfield not only favored the abolition of slavery, but also believed the leaders of the rebellion had forfeited their constitutional rights. He supported the confiscation of Southern plantations and even exile or execution of rebellion leaders as a means to ensure a permanent end to slavery. Garfield felt Congress had an obligation \"to determine what legislation is necessary to secure equal justice to all loyal persons, without regard to color.\" He was more supportive of Lincoln when he took action against slavery.\nGarfield showed leadership early in his congressional career; he was initially the only Republican vote to terminate the use of bounties in military recruiting. Some financially able recruits had used the bounty system to buy their way out of service (called commutation), which Garfield considered reprehensible. He gave a speech pointing out the flaws in the existing conscription law: 300,000 recruits had been called upon to enlist, but barely 10,000 had done so, with the remainder claiming exemption, providing money, or recruiting a substitute. Lincoln appeared before the Military Affairs committee on which Garfield served, demanding a more effective bill; even if it cost him reelection, Lincoln was confident he could win the war before his term expired. After many false starts, Garfield, with Lincoln's support, procured the passage of a conscription bill that excluded commutation.\nUnder Chase's influence, Garfield became a staunch proponent of a dollar backed by a gold standard, and strongly opposed the \"greenback\". He also accepted the necessity of suspension of payment in gold or silver during the Civil War with strong reluctance. He voted with the Radical Republicans in passing the Wade–Davis Bill, designed to give Congress more authority over Reconstruction, but Lincoln defeated it with a pocket veto.\nGarfield did not consider Lincoln very worthy of reelection, but there seemed to be no viable alternative. \"He will probably be the man, though I think we could do better\", he said. Garfield attended the party convention and promoted Rosecrans as Lincoln's running mate, but delegates chose Military Governor of Tennessee Andrew Johnson. Lincoln was reelected, as was Garfield. By then, Chase had left the Cabinet and been appointed Chief Justice, and his relations with Garfield became more distant.\nGarfield took up the practice of law in 1865 to improve his personal finances. His efforts took him to Wall Street where, the day after Lincoln's assassination, a riotous crowd drew him into an impromptu speech to calm their passions: \"Fellow citizens! Clouds and darkness are round about Him! His pavilion is dark waters and thick clouds of the skies! Justice and judgment are the establishment of His throne! Mercy and truth shall go before His face! Fellow citizens! God reigns, and the Government at Washington still lives!\" The speech, with no mention or praise of Lincoln, was, according to Garfield biographer Robert G. Caldwell, \"quite as significant for what it did not contain as for what it did.\" In the following years, Garfield had more praise for Lincoln; a year after Lincoln's death, Garfield said, \"Greatest among all these developments were the character and fame of Abraham Lincoln,\" and in 1878 he called Lincoln \"one of the few great rulers whose wisdom increased with his power\".\nWhen in Washington, Garfield attended Vermont Avenue Christian Church, which later became National City Christian Church, a building constructed and funded by the Disciples.\n\nReconstruction\nIn 1864, the U.S. Senate passed the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery throughout the Union. The bill failed to pass the House by a two-thirds majority until January 31, 1865, when it was then sent to the states for ratification. The Amendment opened other issues concerning African American civil rights. Garfield asked, \"[What] is freedom? Is it the bare privilege of not being chained?...If this is all, then freedom is a bitter mockery, a cruel delusion.\"\nGarfield supported black suffrage as firmly as he supported abolition. President Johnson sought the rapid restoration of the Southern states during the months between his accession and the meeting of Congress in December 1865; Garfield hesitantly supported this policy as an experiment. Johnson, an old friend, sought Garfield's backing and their conversations led Garfield to assume Johnson's differences with Congress were not large. When Congress assembled in December (to Johnson's chagrin, without the elected representatives of the Southern states, who were excluded), Garfield urged conciliation on his colleagues, although he feared that Johnson, a former Democrat, might join other Democrats to gain political control. Garfield foresaw conflict even before February 1866, when Johnson vetoed a bill to extend the life of the Freedmen's Bureau, charged with aiding the former slaves. By April, Garfield had concluded that Johnson was either \"crazy or drunk with opium.\"\n\nThe conflict between Congress and President Johnson was the major issue of the 1866 campaign, with Johnson taking to the campaign trail in a Swing Around the Circle and Garfield facing opposition within the Republican party in his home district. With the South still disenfranchised and Northern public opinion behind the Republicans, they gained a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress. Garfield, having overcome his challengers at the district nominating convention, won reelection easily.\nGarfield opposed the proposed impeachment of Johnson initially when Congress convened in December 1866, but supported legislation to limit Johnson's powers, such as the Tenure of Office Act, which restricted Johnson's ability to remove presidential appointees. Distracted by committee duties, Garfield spoke about these bills rarely, but was a loyal Republican vote against Johnson.\nOn January 7, 1867, Garfield voted in support of the resolution that launched the first impeachment inquiry against Johnson (run by the House Committee on the Judiciary). On December 7, 1867, he voted against the unsuccessful resolution to impeach Johnson that the House Committee on the Judiciary had sent the full House. On January 27, 1868, he voted to pass the resolution that authorized the second impeachment inquiry against Johnson (run by the House Select Committee on Reconstruction). Due to a court case, he was absent on February 24, 1868, when the House impeached Johnson, but gave a speech aligning himself with Thaddeus Stevens and others who sought Johnson's removal shortly thereafter. Garfield was present on March 2 and 3, 1868, when the House voted on specific articles of impeachment, and voted in support of all 11 articles. During the March 2 debate on the articles, Garfield argued that what he characterized as Johnson's attempts to render Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and William H. Emory personal tools of his demonstrated Johnson's intent to disregard the law and override the Constitution, suggesting that Johnson's trial perhaps could be expedited to last only a day in order to hasten his removal. When Johnson was acquitted in his trial before the Senate, Garfield was shocked and blamed the outcome on the trial's presiding officer, Chief Justice Chase, his onetime mentor.\nBy the time Grant succeeded Johnson in 1869, Garfield had moved away from the remaining radicals (Stevens, their leader, had died in 1868). By this time, many in the Republican Party wanted to remove the \"Negro question\" from national affairs. Garfield hailed the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870 as a triumph and favored Georgia's readmission to the Union as a matter of right, not politics. An influential Republican, Garfield said, \"[The] Fifteen Amendment confers on the African race the care of its own destiny. It places their fortunes in their own hands.\" In 1871, Congress took up the Ku Klux Klan Act, which was designed to combat attacks on African Americans' suffrage rights. Garfield opposed the act, saying, \"I have never been more perplexed by a piece of legislation.\" He was torn between his indignation at the Klan, whom he called \"terrorists\", and his concern for the power given the president to enforce the act through suspension of habeas corpus.\n\nTariffs and finance\nThroughout his political career, Garfield favored the gold standard and decried attempts to increase the money supply through the issuance of paper money not backed by gold, and later, through the free and unlimited coinage of silver. In 1865, he was put on the House Ways and Means Committee, a long-awaited opportunity to focus on financial and economic issues. He reprised his opposition to the greenback, saying, \"Any party which commits itself to paper money will go down amid the general disaster, covered with the curses of a ruined people.\" In 1868 Garfield gave a two-hour speech on currency in the House, which was widely applauded as his best oratory to that point; in it, he advocated a gradual resumption of specie payments, that is, the government paying out silver and gold, rather than paper money that could not be redeemed.\nTariffs had been raised to high levels during the Civil War. Afterward, Garfield, who made a close study of financial affairs, advocated moving toward free trade, though the standard Republican position was a protective tariff that would allow American industries to grow. This break with his party likely cost him his place on the Ways and Means Committee in 1867, and though Republicans held the majority in the House until 1875, Garfield remained off that committee. Garfield came to chair the powerful House Appropriations Committee, but it was Ways and Means, with its influence over fiscal policy, that he really wanted to lead. One reason he was denied a place on Ways and Means was the opposition of the influential Republican editor Horace Greeley.\n\nStarting in January 1870, Garfield, then chairman of the House Banking Committee, led an investigation into the Black Friday Gold Panic scandal. In 1869, during Grant's first term in office, two New York conspirators, Jay Gould and James Fisk, launched a scheme to corner the gold market. The conspiracy was broken on Friday, September 24, 1869, when Grant and Treasury Secretary George Boutwell released gold into the market, causing widespread financial panic. During the investigation, rumors spread that Grant's family might have been involved. In order not to force Grant's wife to testify, Garfield had a private meeting with Grant at the White House. When Garfield showed Grant testimony about him and his family, Grant thanked Garfield but refused to read it or give a response. Grant personally resented Garfield for investigating Black Friday and his wife Julia concerning possible involvement in the scandal.\nGarfield's investigation and final majority report, released on September 12, 1870, were thorough but found no indictable offenses and exonerated Grant and Julia of wrongdoing. Garfield thought the scandal was enabled by the greenbacks that financed the speculation. Garfield was not at all enthused about President Grant's reelection in 1872—until Greeley, who emerged as the candidate of the Democrats and Liberal Republicans, became the only serious alternative. Garfield said, \"I would say Grant was not fit to be nominated and Greeley is not fit to be elected.\" Both Grant and Garfield were overwhelmingly reelected.\n\nCrédit Mobilier scandal; salary grab\nThe Crédit Mobilier of America scandal involved corruption in the financing of the Union Pacific Railroad, part of the transcontinental railroad which was completed in 1869. Union Pacific officers and directors secretly purchased control of the Crédit Mobilier of America company, then contracted with it to undertake construction of the railroad. The railroad paid the company's grossly inflated invoices with federal funds appropriated to subsidize the project, and the company was allowed to purchase Union Pacific securities at par value, well below the market rate. Crédit Mobilier showed large profits and stock gains, and distributed substantial dividends. The high expenses meant Congress was called upon to appropriate more funds. One of the railroad officials who controlled Crédit Mobilier was also a congressman, Oakes Ames of Massachusetts. He offered some of his colleagues the opportunity to buy Crédit Mobilier stock at par value, well below what it sold for on the market, and the railroad got its additional appropriations.\n\nThe story broke in July 1872, in the middle of the presidential campaign. Among those named were Vice President Schuyler Colfax, Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson (the Republican candidate for vice president), Speaker James G. Blaine of Maine, and Garfield. Greeley had little luck taking advantage of the scandal. When Congress reconvened after the election, Blaine, seeking to clear his name, demanded a House investigation. Evidence before the special committee exonerated Blaine. Garfield had said in September 1872 that Ames had offered him stock but he had repeatedly refused it. Testifying before the committee in January, Ames said he had offered Garfield ten shares of stock at par value, but that Garfield had never taken them or paid for them, though a year passed, from 1867 to 1868, before Garfield had finally refused. Appearing before the committee on January 14, 1873, Garfield confirmed much of this. Ames testified several weeks later that Garfield agreed to take the stock on credit, and that it was paid for by the company's huge dividends. The two men differed over $300 that Garfield received and later paid back, with Garfield deeming it a loan and Ames a dividend.\nGarfield's biographers have been unwilling to exonerate him in the scandal. Allan Peskin writes, \"Did Garfield lie? Not exactly. Did he tell the truth? Not completely. Was he corrupted? Not really. Even Garfield's enemies never claimed that his involvement in the affair influenced his behavior.\" Rutkow writes, \"Garfield's real offense was that he knowingly denied to the House investigating committee that he had agreed to accept the stock and that he had also received a dividend of $329.\" Caldwell suggests Garfield \"told the truth [before the committee, but] certainly failed to tell the whole truth, clearly evading an answer to certain vital questions and thus giving the impression of worse faults than those of which he was guilty.\" That Crédit Mobilier was a corrupt organization had been a badly kept secret, even mentioned on the floor of Congress, and editor Sam Bowles wrote at the time that Garfield, in his positions on committees dealing with finance, \"had no more right to be ignorant in a matter of such grave importance as this, than the sentinel has to snore on his post.\"\nAnother issue that caused Garfield trouble in his 1874 reelection bid was the so-called \"Salary Grab\" of 1873, which increased the compensation for members of Congress by 50%, retroactive to 1871. As chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Garfield was responsible for shepherding the appropriations bill through the House; during the debate in February 1873, Massachusetts Representative Benjamin Butler offered the increase as an amendment, and despite Garfield's opposition, it passed the House and eventually became law. The law was very popular in the House, as almost half the members were lame ducks, but the public was outraged, and many of Garfield's constituents blamed him, though he personally refused to accept the increase. In a bad year for Republicans, who lost control of the House for the first time since the Civil War, Garfield had his closest congressional election, winning with only 57% of the vote.\n\nFloor leader; Hayes administration\nThe Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives in 1875 meant the loss of Garfield's chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee, though the Democrats did put him on the Ways and Means Committee. With many of his leadership rivals defeated in the 1874 Democratic landslide, and Blaine elected to the Senate, Garfield was seen as the Republican floor leader, and the likely Speaker, should the party regain control of the chamber.\nGarfield thought the land grants given to expanding railroads was an unjust practice. He also opposed monopolistic practices by corporations, as well as the power sought by workers' unions. He supported the proposed establishment of the United States civil service as a means of ridding officials of the annoyance of aggressive office seekers. He especially wished to eliminate the practice of forcing government workers, in exchange for their positions, to kick back a percentage of their wages as political contributions.\nAs the 1876 presidential election approached, Garfield was loyal to the candidacy of Senator Blaine, and fought for the former Speaker's nomination at the 1876 Republican National Convention in Cincinnati. When it became clear, after six ballots, that Blaine could not prevail, the convention nominated Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes. Although Garfield had supported Blaine, he had kept good relations with Hayes, and wholeheartedly supported the governor. Garfield had hoped to retire from politics after his term expired to devote himself full-time to the practice of law, but to help his party, he sought re-election, and won it easily that October. Any celebration was short-lived, as Garfield's youngest son, Neddie, fell ill with whooping cough shortly after the congressional election, and soon died.\n\nWhen Hayes appeared to have lost the presidential election the following month to Democrat Samuel Tilden, the Republicans launched efforts to reverse the results in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida, where they held the governorship. If Hayes won all three states, he would take the election by a single electoral vote. Grant asked Garfield to serve as a \"neutral observer\" of the recount in Louisiana. The observers soon recommended to the state electoral commissions that Hayes be declared the winner—Garfield recommended the entire vote of West Feliciana Parish, which had given Tilden a sizable majority, be thrown out. The Republican governors of the three states certified that Hayes had won their states, to the outrage of Democrats, who had the state legislatures submit rival returns, and threatened to prevent the counting of the electoral vote—under the Constitution, Congress is the final arbiter of the election. Congress then established an Electoral Commission, consisting of eight Republicans and seven Democrats, to determine the winner. Despite his objection to the Commission, Garfield was appointed to it. He felt Congress should count the vote and proclaim Hayes victorious. Hayes emerged the victor by a party line vote of 8–7. In exchange for recognizing Hayes as president, Southern Democrats secured the removal of federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction.\nAlthough an Ohio Senate seat would be vacated by the resignation of John Sherman to become Treasury Secretary, Hayes needed Garfield's expertise to protect him from the agenda of a hostile Congress, and asked him not to seek it. Garfield agreed. As Hayes's key legislator in the House, he gained considerable prestige and respect for his role there. When Congress debated the Bland–Allison Act, to have the government purchase large quantities of silver and strike it into legal tender dollar coins, Garfield opposed it as a deviation from the gold standard; it was enacted over Hayes's veto in February 1878.\nIn 1876, Garfield purchased the property in Mentor that reporters later dubbed Lawnfield, where he conducted the first successful front porch campaign for the presidency. Hayes suggested that Garfield run for governor in 1879, seeing that as a road likely to take Garfield to the White House. Garfield preferred to seek election as a U.S. senator. Rivals were spoken of for the seat, such as Secretary Sherman, but he had presidential ambitions (for which he sought Garfield's support), and other candidates fell by the wayside. The General Assembly elected Garfield to the Senate in January 1880, though his term was not scheduled to commence until March 4, 1881.\n\nLegal career and other activities\nIn 1865, Garfield became a partner in the law firm of a fellow Disciple of Christ, Jeremiah Black. They had much in common, except politics: Black was an avid Democrat, having served in the cabinet of President James Buchanan. The next year, Black was retained by some pro-Confederate northern civilians who had been found guilty of treason in a military court and sentenced to death. Black saw an opportunity to strike a blow against military courts and the Republicans. He had heard Garfield's military speeches, and learned of not only his oratory skills but also his resistance to expansive powers of military commissions. Black assigned the case to Garfield one week before arguments were to be made before the U. S. Supreme Court. When Black warned him of the political peril, Garfield responded, \"It don't make any difference. I believe in English liberty and English law.\" In this landmark case, Ex parte Milligan, Garfield successfully argued that civilians could not be tried before military tribunals, despite a declaration of martial law, as long as civil courts were still operating. In his first court appearance, Garfield's oral argument lasted over two hours, and though his wealthy clients refused to pay him, he had established himself as a preeminent lawyer.\nDuring Grant's first term, Garfield was discontented with public service and in 1872 again pursued opportunities in the law. But he declined a partnership offer from a Cleveland law firm when told his prospective partner was of \"intemperate and licentious\" reputation. In 1873, after Chase's death, Garfield appealed to Grant to appoint Justice Noah H. Swayne Chief Justice, but Grant appointed Morrison R. Waite.\n\nIn 1871, Garfield traveled to Montana Territory to negotiate the removal of the Bitterroot Salish tribe to the Flathead Indian Reservation. Having been told that the people would happily move, Garfield expected an easy task. Instead, he found the Salish determined to stay in their Bitterroot Valley homeland. His attempts to coerce Chief Charlo to sign the agreement nearly brought about a military clash. In the end, he convinced two subchiefs to sign and move to the reservation with a few of the Salish people. Garfield never convinced Charlo to sign, although the official treaty document voted on by Congress bore his forged mark.\nIn 1876, Garfield developed a trapezoid proof of the Pythagorean theorem, which was published in the New England Journal of Education. Mathematics historian William Dunham wrote that Garfield's trapezoid work was \"really a very clever proof.\" According to the Journal, Garfield arrived at the proof \"in mathematical amusements and discussions with other members of congress.\"\nAfter his conversion experience in 1850, religious inquiry was a high priority for Garfield. He read widely and moved beyond the confines of his early experience as a member of the Disciples of Christ. His new, broader perspective was rooted in his devotion to freedom of inquiry and his study of history. The intensity of Garfield's religious thought was also influenced by his experience in combat and his interaction with voters.\n\nPresidential election of 1880\nRepublican nomination\nHaving just been elected to the Senate with John Sherman's support, Garfield was committed to Sherman for the 1880 Republican presidential nomination. Before the convention began, however, a few Republicans, including Wharton Barker of Philadelphia, thought Garfield the best choice for the nomination. Garfield denied any interest in the position, but the attention was enough to make Sherman suspicious of his lieutenant's ambitions. Besides Sherman, the early favorites for the nomination were Blaine, former President Grant; several other candidates attracted delegates as well.\nThe Republican Party at the time was split into two factions: the \"Stalwarts\", who supported the existing federal government patronage system, and the \"Half-Breeds\", who wanted civil service reform. As the convention began, New York Senator Roscoe Conkling, floor leader for the Stalwarts, who supported former President Ulysses S. Grant, proposed that the delegates pledge to back the eventual nominee in the general election. When three West Virginia delegates declined to be so bound, Conkling sought to expel them from the convention. Garfield rose to defend the men, giving a passionate speech in defense of their right to reserve judgment. The crowd turned against Conkling, and he withdrew the motion. The performance delighted Garfield's boosters, who were then convinced he was the only one who could attract a majority of the delegates' votes.\nAfter speeches in favor of the other front-runners, Garfield rose to place Sherman's name in nomination; his speech was well-received, but the delegates mustered little excitement for Sherman as the next president. The first ballot showed Grant leading with 304 votes to Blaine's 284, and Sherman's 93 votes placed him in a distant third. Subsequent ballots demonstrated a deadlock between Grant and Blaine, with neither having the 379 votes needed for nomination. Jeremiah McLain Rusk, a member of the Wisconsin delegation, and Benjamin Harrison, an Indiana delegate, sought to break the deadlock by shifting a few of the anti-Grant votes to a dark horse candidate—Garfield. Garfield gained 50 votes on the 35th ballot, and a stampede began. Garfield protested to the Ohio delegation that he did not seek the nomination and would not betray Sherman, but they overruled his objections and cast their ballots for him. In the next round of voting, nearly all the Sherman and Blaine delegates shifted their support to Garfield, giving him 399 votes, and the Republican nomination. Most of the Grant forces backed the former president to the end, creating a disgruntled Stalwart minority in the party. To obtain that faction's support for the ticket, Chester A. Arthur, a former New York customs collector and member of Conkling's political machine, was chosen as the vice presidential nominee.\n\nCampaign against Hancock\nEven with a Stalwart on the ticket, animosity between the Republican factions carried over from the convention, so Garfield traveled to New York to meet with party leaders. After convincing the Stalwart crowd to put aside their differences and unite for the coming campaign, Garfield returned to Ohio, leaving the active campaigning to others, as was traditional at the time. Meanwhile, the Democrats settled on their nominee, Major General Winfield Scott Hancock of Pennsylvania, a career military officer. Hancock and the Democrats expected to carry the Solid South, while much of the North was considered safe territory for Garfield and the Republicans; most of the campaign focused on a few close states, including New York and Indiana.\nPractical differences between the candidates were few, but Republicans began the campaign with the familiar theme of waving the bloody shirt. They reminded Northern voters the Democratic Party was responsible for secession and four years of civil war, and Democrats would reverse the gains of that war, dishonor Union veterans, and pay Confederate veterans pensions out of the federal treasury. Fifteen years had passed since the end of the war, and with Union generals at the head of both tickets, the bloody shirt was of diminishing value in exciting the voters. With a few months to go before the election, the Republicans switched tactics to emphasize the tariff. Seizing on the Democratic platform's call for a \"tariff for revenue only\", Republicans told Northern workers a Hancock presidency would weaken the tariff protection that kept them in good jobs. Hancock made the situation worse when, attempting to strike a moderate stance, he said, \"The tariff question is a local question.\" The Republican ploy proved effective in uniting the North behind Garfield. Ultimately, of the more than 9.2 million popular votes cast, fewer than 2,000 separated the two candidates. But in the Electoral College, Garfield had an easy victory over Hancock, 214 to 155. The election made Garfield the only sitting member of the House ever to be elected to the presidency.\n\nPresidency (1881)\nCabinet and inauguration\nBefore his inauguration, Garfield was occupied with assembling a cabinet that might engender peace between the party's Conkling and Blaine factions. Blaine's delegates had provided much of the support for Garfield's nomination, so the Maine senator received the place of honor as Secretary of State. Blaine was not only the president's closest advisor, but he was also obsessed with knowing all that took place in the White House, and allegedly posted spies there in his absence. Garfield nominated William Windom of Minnesota as Secretary of the Treasury, William H. Hunt of Louisiana as Secretary of the Navy, Robert Todd Lincoln as Secretary of War, and Samuel J. Kirkwood of Iowa as Secretary of the Interior. New York was represented by Thomas Lemuel James as Postmaster General. Garfield appointed Pennsylvania's Wayne MacVeagh, an adversary of Blaine's, as Attorney General. Blaine tried to sabotage the appointment by convincing Garfield to name an opponent of MacVeagh, William E. Chandler, as Solicitor General under MacVeagh. Only Chandler's rejection by the Senate forestalled MacVeagh's resignation over the matter.\nBecause Garfield was distracted by cabinet maneuvering, his inaugural address was a \"compendium of platitudes\" and fell below expectations. At one high point, however, Garfield emphasized the civil rights of African-Americans, saying \"Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen.\" After discussing the gold standard, the need for education, and an unexpected denunciation of Mormon polygamy, the speech ended. The crowd applauded, but the speech, according to Peskin, \"however sincerely intended, betrayed its hasty composition by the flatness of its tone and the conventionality of its subject matter.\"\nGarfield's appointment of James infuriated Conkling, a factional opponent of the Postmaster General, who demanded a compensatory appointment for his faction, such as the position of Secretary of the Treasury. The resulting squabble occupied much of Garfield's brief presidency. The feud with Conkling reached a climax when the president, at Blaine's instigation, nominated Conkling's enemy, Judge William H. Robertson, to be Collector of the Port of New York. This was one of the prize patronage positions below cabinet level and was then held by Edwin A. Merritt. Conkling raised the time-honored principle of senatorial courtesy in an attempt to defeat the nomination, to no avail. Garfield, who believed the practice was corrupt, would not back down and threatened to withdraw all nominations unless Robertson was confirmed, intending to \"settle the question whether the president is registering clerk of the Senate or the Executive of the United States.\" Ultimately, Conkling and his New York colleague, Senator Thomas C. Platt, resigned their Senate seats to seek vindication but found only further humiliation when the New York legislature elected others in their places. Robertson was confirmed as Collector and Garfield's victory was clear. To Blaine's chagrin, the victorious Garfield returned to his goal of balancing the interests of party factions and nominated a number of Conkling's Stalwart friends to offices.\nWith his cabinet complete, Garfield had to contend with myriad office seekers. He exclaimed, \"My God! What is there in this place that a man should ever get into it.\" Garfield's family happily settled into the White House, but he found presidential duties exasperating.\n\nRefinance of national debt\nGarfield ordered the Secretary of the Treasury William Windom to refund (refinance) the national debt by calling in outstanding U.S. bonds paying 6% interest. Holders would have the option of accepting cash or new bonds at 3%, closer to the interest rates of the time. Taxpayers were saved an estimated $10 million. By comparison, federal expenditures in 1881 were below $261 million (~$7.09 billion in 2023).\n\nSupreme Court nomination\nIn 1880, President Hayes had nominated Stanley Matthews to the Supreme Court but the Senate declined to act on the nomination. In March 1881, Garfield re-nominated Matthews to the Court and the Senate confirmed Matthews by a vote of 24–23. According to The New York Times, \"opposition to Matthews's Supreme Court appointment ... stemmed from his prosecution in 1859 of a newspaper editor who had assisted two runaway slaves.\" Because Matthews was \"a professed abolitionist at the time, the matter was later framed as political expediency triumphing over moral principle.\" Matthews served on the Court until his death in 1889.\n\nReforms\nGrant and Hayes had both advocated civil service reform, and by 1881 such reform associations had organized with renewed energy across the nation. Garfield sympathized with them, believing the spoils system damaged the presidency and often eclipsed more important concerns. Some reformers became disappointed when Garfield promoted limited tenure only to minor office seekers and gave appointments to his old friends.\nCorruption in the post office also cried out for reform. In April 1880, there had been a congressional investigation of corruption in the Post Office Department, where profiteering rings allegedly stole millions of dollars, securing bogus mail contracts on star routes. After obtaining contracts with the lowest bid, costs to run the mail routes would be escalated and profits would be divided among ring members. Shortly after taking office, Garfield received word of postal corruption by an alleged star route ringleader, Assistant Postmaster General Thomas J. Brady. Garfield demanded Brady's resignation and ordered prosecutions that ended in trials for conspiracy. When told that his party, including his campaign manager, Stephen W. Dorsey, was involved, Garfield directed that the corruption in the Post Office be rooted out \"to the bone\", regardless of where it might lead. Brady resigned and was indicted for conspiracy, though jury trials in 1882 and 1883 found Brady not guilty.\n\nCivil rights and education\nGarfield believed the key to improving the state of African American civil rights was government supported education. During Reconstruction, freedmen had gained citizenship and suffrage, which enabled them to participate in government, but Garfield believed their rights were being eroded by Southern white resistance and illiteracy, and he was concerned that blacks would become America's permanent \"peasantry\". He proposed a \"universal\" education system funded by the federal government. In February 1866, as a congressman from Ohio, Garfield and Ohio School Commissioner Emerson Edward White had drafted a bill for the National Department of Education. They believed that through the use of statistics they could push the US Congress to establish a federal agency for school reform. But by the time of Garfield's presidency, Congress and the northern white public had lost interest in African-American rights, and Congress did not pass federal funding for universal education during his term. Garfield also worked to appoint several African Americans to prominent positions: Frederick Douglass, recorder of deeds in Washington; Robert Elliot, special agent to the Treasury; John M. Langston, Haitian minister; and Blanche K. Bruce, register to the Treasury. Garfield believed Southern support for the Republican Party could be gained by \"commercial and industrial\" interests rather than race issues and began to reverse Hayes's policy of conciliating Southern Democrats. He appointed William H. Hunt, a Republican from Louisiana, as Secretary of the Navy. To break the hold of the resurgent Democratic Party in the Solid South, Garfield took patronage advice from Virginia Senator William Mahone of the biracial independent Readjuster Party, hoping to add the independents' strength to the Republicans' there.\n\nForeign policy and naval reform\nGarfield had little foreign policy experience, so he leaned heavily on Blaine. They agreed on the need to promote freer trade, especially within the Western Hemisphere. Garfield and Blaine believed increasing trade with Latin America would be the best way to keep the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from dominating the region. And by encouraging exports, they believed they could increase American prosperity. Garfield authorized Blaine to call for a Pan-American conference in 1882 to mediate disputes among the Latin American nations and to serve as a forum for talks on increasing trade.\nAt the same time, they hoped to negotiate a peace in the War of the Pacific then being fought by Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. Blaine favored a resolution that would result in Peru yielding no territory, but Chile by 1881 had occupied the Peruvian capital of Lima, and rejected any settlement that restored the previous status quo.\nGarfield sought to expand American influence in other areas, calling for renegotiation of the Clayton–Bulwer Treaty to allow the United States to construct a canal through Panama without British involvement and attempting to reduce British influence in the strategically located Kingdom of Hawaii. Garfield's and Blaine's plans for the United States' involvement in the world stretched even beyond the Western Hemisphere, as he sought commercial treaties with Korea and Madagascar. Garfield also considered enhancing U.S. military strength abroad, asking Navy Secretary Hunt to investigate the navy's condition with an eye toward expansion and modernization. In the end, these ambitious plans came to nothing after Garfield was assassinated. Nine countries had accepted invitations to the Pan-American conference, but the invitations were withdrawn in April 1882 after Blaine resigned from the cabinet and Arthur, Garfield's successor, cancelled the conference. Naval reform continued under Arthur, on a more modest scale than Garfield and Hunt had envisioned, ultimately ending in the construction of the Squadron of Evolution.\n\nAssassination\nGuiteau and shooting\nCharles J. Guiteau had followed various professions in his life, but in 1880 had determined to gain federal office by supporting what he expected would be the winning Republican ticket. He composed a speech, \"Garfield vs. Hancock\", and got it printed by the Republican National Committee. One means of persuading the voters in that era was through orators expounding on the candidate's merits, but with the Republicans seeking more famous men, Guiteau received few opportunities to speak. On one occasion, according to Kenneth D. Ackerman, Guiteau was unable to finish his speech due to nerves. Guiteau, who considered himself a Stalwart, deemed his contribution to Garfield's victory sufficient to justify his appointment to the position of consul in Paris, despite the fact that he spoke no French, nor any foreign language. One medical expert has since described Guiteau as possibly a narcissistic schizophrenic; neuroscientist Kent Kiehl assessed him as a clinical psychopath.\n\nOne of Garfield's more wearying duties was seeing office-seekers, and he saw Guiteau at least once. White House officials suggested to Guiteau that he approach Blaine, as the consulship was within the Department of State. Blaine also saw the public regularly, and Guiteau became a regular at these sessions. Blaine, who had no intention of giving Guiteau a position he was unqualified for and had not earned, simply said the deadlock in the Senate over Robertson's nomination made it impossible to consider the Paris consulship, which required Senate confirmation. Once the New York senators had resigned, and Robertson had been confirmed as Collector, Guiteau pressed his claim, and Blaine told him he would not receive the position.\nGuiteau came to believe he had lost the position because he was a Stalwart. He decided the only way to end the Republican Party's internecine warfare was for Garfield to die—though he had nothing personal against the president. Arthur's succession would restore peace, he felt, and lead to rewards for fellow Stalwarts, including Guiteau.\nThe assassination of Abraham Lincoln was deemed a fluke due to the Civil War, and Garfield, like most people, saw no reason the president should be guarded; his movements and plans were often printed in the newspapers. Guiteau knew Garfield would leave Washington for a cooler climate on July 2, 1881, and made plans to kill him before then. He purchased a gun he thought would look good in a museum, and followed Garfield several times, but each time his plans were frustrated, or he lost his nerve. His opportunities dwindled to one—Garfield's departure by train for New Jersey on the morning of July 2.\nGuiteau concealed himself by the ladies' waiting room at the Sixth Street Station of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad, from where Garfield was scheduled to depart. Most of Garfield's cabinet planned to accompany him at least part of the way. Blaine, who was to remain in Washington, came to the station to see him off. The two men were deep in conversation and did not notice Guiteau before he took out his revolver and shot Garfield twice, once in the back and once in the arm. Guiteau attempted to leave the station but was quickly captured. As Blaine recognized him, Guiteau was led away, and said, \"I did it. I will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be President.\" News of his motivation to benefit the Stalwarts reached many with the news of the shooting, causing rage against that faction.\n\nTreatment and death\nGarfield was struck by two shots: one glanced off his arm while the other pierced his back, shattering a rib and embedding itself in his abdomen. \"My God, what is this?\" he exclaimed. Among those at the station was Robert Todd Lincoln, who was deeply upset, thinking back to when his father Abraham Lincoln was assassinated 16 years earlier. Garfield was taken on a mattress upstairs to a private office, where several doctors examined him. At his request, Garfield was taken back to the White House, and his wife, then in New Jersey, was sent for. Blaine sent word to Vice President Arthur in New York City, who received threats against his life because of his animosity toward Garfield and Guiteau's statements.\nAlthough Joseph Lister's pioneering work in antisepsis was known to American doctors, few of them had confidence in it, and none of his advocates were among Garfield's treating physicians. The physician who took charge at the depot and then at the White House was Doctor Willard Bliss. A noted physician and surgeon, Bliss was an old friend of Garfield, and about a dozen doctors, led by Bliss, were soon probing the wound with unsterilized fingers and instruments. Garfield was given morphine for the pain, and asked Bliss to frankly tell him his chances, which Bliss put at one in a hundred. \"Well, Doctor, we'll take that chance.\"\nOver the next few days, Garfield made some improvement, as the nation viewed the news from the capital and prayed. Although he never stood again, he was able to sit up and write several times, and his recovery was viewed so positively that a steamer was fitted out as a seagoing hospital to aid with his convalescence. He was nourished on oatmeal porridge (which he detested) and milk from a cow on the White House lawn. When told that Indian chief Sitting Bull, a prisoner of the army, was starving, Garfield said, \"Let him starve...\" initially, but a few moments later said, \"No, send him my oatmeal.\"\n\nX-ray imaging, which could have assisted physicians in precisely locating the bullet in Garfield's body, would not be invented for another 14 years. Alexander Graham Bell tried to locate the bullet with a primitive metal detector, but was unsuccessful, though the device had been effective when tested on others. But Bliss limited its use on Garfield, ensuring he remained in charge. Because Bliss insisted the bullet rested someplace it did not, the detector could not locate it. Bell shortly returned after adjusting his device, which emitted an unusual tone in the area where Bliss believed the bullet was lodged. Bliss took this as confirmation that the bullet was where he declared it to be. Bliss recorded the test as a success, saying it was: now unanimously agreed that the location of the ball has been ascertained with reasonable certainty, and that it lies, as heretofore stated, in the front wall of the abdomen, immediately over the groin, about five inches [130 mm] below and to the right of the navel.\nOne means of keeping Garfield comfortable in Washington's summer heat was one of the first successful air conditioning units: air propelled by fans over ice and then dried reduced the temperature in the sickroom by 20 °F (11 °C). Engineers from the navy, and other scientists, worked together to develop it, though there were problems to solve, such as excessive noise and increased humidity.\nOn July 23, Garfield took a turn for the worse when his temperature increased to 104 °F (40 °C); doctors, concerned by an abscess at the wound, inserted a drainage tube. This initially helped, and the bedridden Garfield held a brief cabinet meeting on July 29; members were under orders from Bliss to discuss nothing that might excite Garfield. Doctors probed the abscess, hoping to find the bullet; they likely made the infections worse. Garfield performed only one official act in August, signing an extradition paper. By the end of the month, he was much feebler than he had been, and his weight had decreased from 210 pounds (95 kg) to 130 pounds (59 kg).\nGarfield had long been anxious to escape hot, unhealthy Washington, and in early September the doctors agreed to move him to Elberon, part of Long Branch, New Jersey, where his wife had recovered earlier in the summer. He left the White House for the last time on September 5, traveling in a specially cushioned railway car; a spur line to the Francklyn Cottage, a seaside mansion given over to his use, was built in a night by volunteers. After arriving in Elberon the next day, Garfield was moved from the train car to a bedroom where he could see the ocean as officials and reporters maintained what became (after an initial rally) a death watch. Garfield's personal secretary, Joe Stanley Brown, wrote forty years later, \"to this day I cannot hear the sound of the low slow roll of the Atlantic on the shore, the sound which filled my ears as I walked from my cottage to his bedside, without recalling again that ghastly tragedy.\"\n\nOn September 18, Garfield asked Colonel A.F. Rockwell, a friend, if he would have a place in history. Rockwell assured him he would and told Garfield he had much work still before him. But his response was, \"No, my work is done.\" The following day, Garfield, then suffering also from pneumonia and hypertension, marveled that he could not pick up a glass despite feeling well and went to sleep without discomfort. He awoke that evening around 10:15 p.m. complaining of great pain in his chest to his chief of staff General David Swaim, who was watching him, as he placed his hand over his heart. The president then requested a drink of water from Swaim. After finishing his glass, Garfield said, \"Oh Swaim, this terrible pain—press your hand on it.\" As Swaim put his hand on Garfield's chest, Garfield's hands went up reflexively. Clutching his heart, he exclaimed, \"Oh, Swaim, can't you stop this? Oh, oh, Swaim!\" Those were Garfield's last words. Swaim ordered another attendant to send for Bliss, who found Garfield unconscious. Despite efforts to revive him, Garfield never awoke, and he was pronounced dead at about 10:30 p.m. Learning from a reporter of Garfield's death the following day, Chester A. Arthur took the presidential oath of office administered by New York Supreme Court Justice John R. Brady.\nAccording to some historians and medical experts, Garfield might have survived his wounds had the doctors attending him had at their disposal today's medical research, knowledge, techniques, and equipment. Standard medical practice at the time dictated that priority be given to locating the path of the bullet. Several of his doctors inserted their unsterilized fingers into the wound to probe for the bullet, a common practice in the 1880s. Historians agree that massive infection was a significant factor in Garfield's demise. Biographer Peskin said medical malpractice did not contribute to Garfield's death; the inevitable infection and blood poisoning that would ensue from a deep bullet wound resulted in damage to multiple organs and spinal fragmentation. Rutkow, a professor of surgery at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, has argued that starvation also played a role. Rutkow suggests \"Garfield had such a nonlethal wound. In today's world, he would have gone home in a matter of two or three days.\" The conventional narrative regarding Garfield's post-shooting medical condition was challenged by Theodore Pappas and Shahrzad Joharifard in a 2013 article in The American Journal of Surgery. They argued that Garfield died from a late rupture of a splenic artery pseudoaneurysm, which developed secondary to the path of the bullet adjacent to the splenic artery. They also argued that his sepsis was actually caused by post-traumatic acute acalculous cholecystitis. Based on the autopsy report, the authors speculate that his gallbladder subsequently ruptured, leading to the development of a large bile-containing abscess adjacent to the gallbladder. Pappas and Joharifard say this caused the septic decline in Garfield's condition that was visible starting from July 23, 1881. Pappas and Joharifard also state that they don't believe that Garfield's doctors could have saved him even if they had been aware of his cholecystitis, since the first successful cholecystectomy (surgical removal of the gallbladder) was performed a year after Garfield's death.\nGuiteau was indicted on October 14, 1881, for the murder of the president. During his trial, Guiteau declared that he was not responsible for Garfield's death, admitting to the shooting but not the killing. In his defense, Guiteau wrote: \"General Garfield died from malpractice. According to his own physicians, he was not fatally shot. The doctors who mistreated him ought to bear the odium of his death, and not his assailant. They ought to be indicted for murdering James A. Garfield, and not me.\" After a chaotic trial in which Guiteau often interrupted and argued, and in which his counsel used the insanity defense, the jury found him guilty on January 25, 1882, and he was sentenced to death by hanging. Guiteau may have had neurosyphilis, a disease that causes physiological mental impairment. He was executed on June 30, 1882.\n\nFuneral, memorials and commemorations\nGarfield's funeral train left Long Branch on the same special track that had brought him there, traveling over tracks blanketed with flowers and past houses adorned with flags. His body was transported to the Capitol and then continued on to Cleveland for burial. Shocked by his death, Marine Band leader John Philip Sousa composed the march \"In Memoriam\", which was played when Garfield's body was received in Washington, D.C. More than 70,000 citizens, some waiting over three hours, passed by Garfield's coffin as his body lay in state from September 21 to 23, 1881, at the United States Capitol rotunda; on September 25, in Cleveland, Garfield's casket was paraded down Euclid Avenue from Wilson Avenue to Public Square, with those in attendance including former presidents Grant and Hayes, and Generals William Sherman, Sheridan and Hancock. More than 150,000—a number equal to the city's population—likewise paid their respects, and Sousa's march was again played. Garfield's body was temporarily interred in the Schofield family vault in Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery until his permanent memorial was built.\nMemorials to Garfield were erected across the country. On April 10, 1882, seven months after Garfield's death, the U.S. Post Office Department issued a postage stamp in his honor. In 1884, sculptor Frank Happersberger completed a monument on the grounds of the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers. In 1887, the James A. Garfield Monument was dedicated in Washington. Another monument, in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, was erected in 1896. In Victoria, Australia, Cannibal Creek was renamed Garfield in his honor.\n\nOn May 19, 1890, Garfield's body was permanently interred, with great solemnity and fanfare, in a mausoleum in Lake View Cemetery. Attending the dedication ceremonies were former President Hayes, President Benjamin Harrison, and future president William McKinley. Garfield's Treasury Secretary, William Windom, also attended. Harrison said Garfield was always a \"student and instructor\" and that his life works and death would \"continue to be instructive and inspiring incidents in American history\". Three panels on the monument display Garfield as a teacher, Union major general, and orator; another shows him taking the presidential oath, and a fifth shows his body lying in state at the Capitol rotunda in Washington, D.C.\nGarfield's murder by a deranged office-seeker awakened public awareness of the need for civil service reform legislation. Senator George H. Pendleton, a Democrat from Ohio, launched a reform effort that resulted in the Pendleton Act in January 1883. This act reversed the \"spoils system\" where office seekers paid up or gave political service to obtain or keep federally appointed positions. Under the act, appointments were awarded on merit and competitive examination. To ensure the reform was implemented, Congress and Arthur established and funded the Civil Service Commission. The Pendleton Act, however, covered only 10% of federal government workers. For Arthur, previously known for having been a \"veteran spoilsman\", civil service reform became his most noteworthy achievement.\nA marble statue of Garfield by Charles Niehaus was added to the National Statuary Hall Collection in the Capitol in Washington D.C., a gift from the State of Ohio in 1886.\nGarfield is honored with a life-size bronze sculpture inside the Cuyahoga County Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Cleveland, Ohio.\nOn March 2, 2019, the National Park Service erected exhibit panels in Washington to mark the site of his assassination.\n\nLegacy and historical view\nFor a few years after his assassination, Garfield's life story was seen as an exemplar of the American success story—that even the poorest boy might someday become President of the United States. Peskin wrote: \"In mourning Garfield, Americans were not only honoring a president; they were paying tribute to a man whose life story embodied their own most cherished aspirations.\" As the rivalry between Stalwarts and Half-Breeds faded from the scene in the late 1880s and after, so too did memories of Garfield. In the 1890s, Americans became disillusioned with politicians, and looked elsewhere for inspiration, focusing on industrialists, labor leaders, scientists, and others as their heroes. Increasingly, Garfield's short time as president was forgotten.\n\nThe 20th century saw no revival for Garfield. Thomas Wolfe deemed the presidents of the Gilded Age, including Garfield, \"lost Americans\" whose \"gravely vacant and bewhiskered faces mixed, melted, swam together\". The politicians of the Gilded Age faded from the public eye, their luster eclipsed by those who had influenced America outside of political office during that time; the robber barons, the inventors, those who had sought social reform, and others who had lived as America rapidly changed. Current events and more recent figures occupied America's attention. According to Ackerman, \"the busy Twentieth Century has made Garfield's era seem remote and irrelevant, its leaders ridiculed for their very obscurity.\"\nGarfield's biographers, and those who have studied his presidency, tend to think well of him, and that his presidency saw a promising start before its untimely end. Historian Justus D. Doenecke, while deeming Garfield a bit of an enigma, chronicles his achievements: \"by winning a victory over the Stalwarts, he enhanced both the power and prestige of his office. As a man, he was intelligent, sensitive, and alert, and his knowledge of how government worked was unmatched.\" Doenecke criticizes Garfield's dismissal of Merritt in Robertson's favor, and wonders if the president was truly in command of the situation even after the latter's confirmation. In 1931, Caldwell wrote: \"If Garfield lives in history, it will be partly on account of the charm of his personality—but also because in life and in death, he struck the first shrewd blows against a dangerous system of boss rule which seemed for a time about to engulf the politics of the nation. Perhaps if he had lived he could have done no more.\" Rutkow writes that \"James Abram Garfield's presidency is reduced to a tantalizing 'what if.'\"\nIn 2002, historian Bernard A. Weisberger said, \"[Garfield] was, to some extent, a perfect moderate. He read widely (and unobtrusively) without its visibly affecting his Christianity, his Republicanism, or his general laissez-faire orthodoxy. He was not so much a scholar in politics as a politic scholar.\" Peskin believes Garfield deserves more credit for his political career than he has received: \"True, his accomplishments were neither bold nor heroic, but his was not an age that called for heroism. His stormy presidency was brief, and in some respects, unfortunate, but he did leave the office stronger than he found it. As a public man he had a hand in almost every issue of national importance for almost two decades, while as a party leader he, along with Blaine, forged the Republican Party into the instrument that would lead the United States into the twentieth century.\"\n\nNotes\nReferences\nWorks cited\nFurther reading\nFuller, Corydon E. (2022) [1887]. Reminiscences of James A. Garfield. Hansebooks. ISBN 978-3-34807-944-0.\nGoodyear, C. W. (2023). President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier. New York, New York: Simon & Schuster.\nGraff Henry F., ed. The Presidents: A Reference History (3rd ed. 2002) online\nHammond, William A.; Ashhurst, Jr., John; Sims, J. Marion; Hodgen, John T. (December 1881). \"The Surgical Treatment of President Garfield\". The North American Review. 133 (301): 578–610. JSTOR 25101018.\nHoudek, John Thomas. \"James A. Garfield and Rutherford B. Hayes: A Study in State and National Politics\" (PhD dissertation, Michigan State University; Proquest Dissertations Publishing, 1970. 7111871).\nMenke, Richard. \"Media in America, 1881: Garfield, Guiteau, Bell, Whitman.\" Critical Inquiry 31.3 (2005): 638–664.\nMillard, Candice (2012). Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. New York, New York: Anchor Books. ISBN 978-0-7679-2971-4.\nNorth, Ira Lutts. \"A rhetorical criticism of the speaking of James Abram Garfield, 1876-1880\" (PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University; ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1953. DP69446).\nRushford, Jerry Bryant. \"Political Disciple: The Relationship Between James A. Garfield And The Disciples Of Christ\" (PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara; ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1977. 7807029).\nSkidmore, Max J. \"James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur.\" in Maligned Presidents: The Late 19th Century (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2014) pp. 63–79.\nSutton, Thomas C. \"James A. Garfield.\" in The Presidents and the Constitution (Volume One. New York University Press, 2020) pp. 266–275.\nUhler, Kevin A. \"The demise of patronage: Garfield, the midterm election, and the passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Act\" (PhD. Diss. The Florida State University, 2011) online.\nVermilya, Daniel J. James Garfield and the Civil War: For Ohio and the Union (Arcadia Publishing, 2015).\n\nExternal links\n\nGarfield, James Abram, (1831–1881) Congressional Biography\nJames Garfield: A Resource Guide from the Library of Congress\nJames A. Garfield at the Database of Classical Scholars\n[http://millercenter.org/president/garfield Brief essays on James A. Garfield and his administration from the Miller Center of Public Affairs\n\"Life Portrait of James Garfield\", from C-SPAN's American Presidents: Life Portraits, July 26, 1999\nWorks by or about James A. Garfield at the Internet Archive\nWorks by James A. Garfield at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) \nNotable alumni of Delta Upsilon fraternity, including Garfield\nJames A. Garfield Personal Manuscripts\nJames A. Garfield Collection at Williams College Chapin Library\nJames A. Garfield Collection at Williams College Archives and Special Collections\nOfficial medical bulletins relating to the health of U.S. President James Garfield from the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Contains medical bulletins issued by attending physicians D. Hayes Agnes, J.K. Barnes, D. W. Bliss, Frank H. Hamilton, Robert Reyburn, and J.J. Woodward between July 6 – September 19, 1881.\n\nBased on all the information, answer the query. \n\nQuery: If my future wife has the same first name as the 15th first lady of the United States' mother and her surname is the same as the second assassinated president's mother's maiden name, what is my future wife's name? \n\n"}