James Buchanan enters the presidency like a lawyer walking into a burning building with a leather briefcase and a belief that precedent can outshout fire. He is, by the time the oath touches his lips in March 1857, the most experienced public servant in the country: state legislator, congressman, senator, minister to Russia, secretary of state, minister to Great Britain, confidant to party captains on both sides of the Appalachians, a Pennsylvanian with Southern friends and Northern clients. His résumé reads like the ledger of a republic that still believed patience would always be rewarded, and his temperament is exactly the sort that ledger trains: courteous to a fault, attentive to forms, allergic to improvisation, convinced that if every clause is carefully read and every channel of consultation respected, even the angriest currents can be coaxed into a harbor. He is unmarried, which his enemies will later use as a hook for gossip and his friends as a sign that the country can be his household. He is careful with money, protective of reputation, and persuaded that moderation is not merely a tactic but a philosophy. This combination—skill, caution, confidence in law—would have made him an admirable administrator in a quiet decade. He is not given a quiet decade. He is given the hinge on which the nineteenth century swings, and he tries to oil it with memoranda.

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