| SanAndreasX said: Buchanan's interference in the Dred Scott case was unforgivable. However, I will say that the country was already under low-grade guerilla warfare before Buchanan took office (Bleeding Kansas), and if it hadn't been Dred Scott, it would have been something else. The country was an ever-growing powder keg from the time the Three Fifths Compromise was written into the main body of the Constitution. Something else would have sparked it. The Mexican-American War, and the fights over the slave status of Texas and California, was probably where civil war became an inevitability. Lincoln's election was the straw that broke the camel's back. |
Can't help agreeing with your assessment, especially in that the Mexican-American War led directly to the infamous fugitive slave law that really forced the non-slavery states to care about the issue of slavery everywhere in the country. It famously inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to author the legendary Uncle Tom's Cabin, among many other things. The whole trajectory began in earnest though with that particular war.
Historical inevitability does not absolve Buchanan by a long shot though. Certainly not his malign acceleration of the crisis, let alone his lack of action even after states began to secede.
