Regardless, the four years of Buchanans administration might have either confronted heads-on any calls for secession, as Jackson had done earlier in South Carolina, or worked as his inaugural address promised, to find a centrist position much as Martin Van Buren had accomplished, thereby avoiding the start of the nations bloodiest and most divisive war.
ReferencesJames Buchanan, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1857Larry Flynt and David Eisenbach, PhD, One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents First Ladies and their Lovers Changed the Course of American History (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2011)Page Smith, A Nation Comes of Age: A Peoples Historybof the Ante-Bellum Years, Volume Four, (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981)Kenneth M. Stamp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (Oxford University Press, 1990)
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