President James Buchanan and the American Civil War: Part I: Bleeding Kansas

James Buchanan was US President from 1857-1861. He is often considered one of the worst presidents of the US, with his presidency leading up to the US Civil War. Here, Ian Craig takes a look at Buchanan’s presidency. He starts by arguing that, in spite of his Democratic Party generally favoring slavery, what are often seen as pro-slavery actions during the Bleeding Kansas crisis (1854-1861), actually led to Kansas becoming an anti-slavery state.

1859 portrait of President James Buchanan. Painting by George Peter Alexander Healy.

Of all the presidents in the history of the United States, none have been as ridiculed as the man who became the fifteenth president on March 4, 1857. Having secured the Democratic nomination in 1856, James Buchanan had little trouble defeating the Republican Party’s first candidate John C. Frémont and former president Millard Fillmore. At the time of his election, Buchanan was the nation’s most qualified person to hold the office of chief executive. Having been a lawyer, state legislature, U.S. representative, U.S. Senator, minister to both Russia and Great Britain, and Secretary of State, Buchanan remains one of the only presidents in U.S. history to have an extensive public service background.  The question then remains is, why he is considered the worst president in history and why is he blamed for the Civil War? These questions will be answered over a series of articles sequencing key events in Buchanan’s presidency.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

In his last message to Congress on January 8, 1861, Buchanan stated that, “I shall carry to my grave the consciousness that I at least meant well for my country.”[1]Since that time, over one hundred and fifty years have past since he left office and the Civil War concluded. However, his legacy remains plagued by the questions posed above.  To really understand the actions taken by Buchanan leading up to the outbreak of Civil War, one must look into the political climate of the time as well as the personal beliefs that shaped Buchanan’s governing style.

One particular event that would have a direct impact of Buchanan once he became president was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.  This allowed for Kansas and Nebraska to create governments and decide for themselves the slavery question while also repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820.  Pro-slavery settlers from neighboring Missouri crossed the border illegally into Kansas, heavily influencing the election of a pro-slavery government in Kansas. This led to violence in the territory as both pro-slavery and anti-slavery groups fought for control.  It also led to the creation of two governments, one at Lecompton (pro-slavery) and one at Topeka (anti-slavery).  This series of events later became known as “Bleeding Kansas” for the violence and death that occurred.  Even the United States Senate was not spared from the violence. In 1856, Senator Charles Sumner was beaten over the head with a cane by Congressman Preston Brooks on the floor of the Senate.  Sumner had called out a relative of Brooks regarding the slavery issue offending his honor. Lecompton was also recognized as the legitimate government despite hostilities.

Dealing with Bleeding Kansas

Upon assuming office, Buchanan had to deal with the crisis in Kansas left to him by his predecessor Franklin Pierce.  Pierce had signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act believing that territories were “perfectly free to form and regulate their institutions in their own way.”[2]However, Pierce would come to favor the pro-slavery legislation over that of the anti-slavery actions.  James Buchanan’s views of the Kansas-Nebraska Act were not favorable. He wrote that “Congress which had commenced so auspiciously, by repealing the Missouri Compromise…reopened the floodgates of sectional strife.”[3]The governing style of James Buchanan was one based on that of a diplomat.  Having an extensive background as a negotiator, he used his prior experience in his many diplomatic and legislative roles as chief executive.  He also heavily relied on his days as a lawyer and his knowledge of constitutional law to formulate his opinions.  This is how he dealt with the crisis in Kansas.

As president, Buchanan believed that he did not have the authority to interfere in the elections which took place in Kansas despite the fraud that had occurred there.  He wrote that “it was far from my intention to interfere with the decision of the people of Kansas wither for or against slavery.”[4]Essentially, Buchanan felt that the people of Kansas could settle the matter themselves without government intervention. Despite his intentions, Buchanan took military action in sending federal troops to Kansas in 1857 to secure the legitimacy of a state constitution without fraud or violence.  His justification for this was that it was his duty to protect the recognized government and the people’s wishes as President of the United States.  Buchanan recalls, “under these circumstances, what was my duty? Was it not to sustain this government (in Lecompton)? To protect us from the violence of lawless men, who were determined to ruin or rule? It was for this purpose, and this alone, that I ordered a military force to Kansas.”[5]

In doing this, Buchanan was criticized for appearing to support the pro-slavery party in creating a slave state.  This, however, was not the case as he attempted to perform his duties in executing the laws and by preserving and protecting the Constitution.  He states in a broad question to such people, “would you have desired that I abandoned the Territorial Government, sanctioned as it had been by Congress, to illegal violence…this would, indeed have been to violate my oath of office.”[6]Standing firm on his beliefs, Buchanan was convinced that his action would help to support a positive and legal result at the next election.  To him, it was still up to the people to decide on the manner.

1858 Kansas Election

In early 1858, a new election was held to elect state officials based on the passage of the constitution in November.  This election for governor, lieutenant governor, and other officials, resulted in the election of several members of the anti-slavery Topeka Convention.  The balance of power shifted towards them and they were more determined to vote in the creation of a constitution with some aspects of the Lecompton Constitution.  James Buchanan took this as a victory because he had wished that the anti-slavery party would take part in the elections.  Buchanan, writing in the third person, states that “it had been his constant effort from the beginning to induce the Anti-Slavery party to vote.  Now that this had been accomplished, he knew that all revolutionary troubles in Kansas would speedily terminate.  A resort of the ballot box, instead of force, was the most effectual means of restoring peace and tranquility.”[7]Buchanan, keeping to his constitutional beliefs, used force only to enforce the rights of the people to vote under the Constitution. Essentially, Buchanan gave the anti-slavery party the tools to vote in a free and fair election without fear of violence.  It only took them a while to take him up on his efforts before they would vote in the government.  James Buchanan recognized that they were in effect the majority of the population and in accordance with the law, it was up to them to decide the slavery question.  

On February 2, 1858, James Buchanan gave a message to Congress regarding the constitution of Kansas.  The newly elected government (with a large majority of anti-slavery supporters) had sent the Lecompton Constitution (with slavery elements) to the president for Congressional approval.  In Buchanan’s message he stated that “slavery can therefore never be prohibited in Kansas except by means of a constitutional provision, and in no manner can this be obtained so promptly.”[8]Although this may be interpreted as pro-slavery, to Buchanan it was not, because the people of Kansas had elected their leaders and had submitted a constitution in forming a state legally.  It was his duty to ensure that their wishes were carried out. He warns that, “should Congress reject the constitution…no man can foretell the consequences.”[9]In Buchanan’s eyes, the admittance of Kansas into the Union in a timely manner would “restore peace and quiet to the whole country.”[10]  In closing his message to Congress, he admits that he had been forced to act in Kansas on behalf of the people to ensure fair elections and opportunities for both sides. He states of the matter, “I have been obliged in some degree to interfere with the expedition in order to keep down rebellion in Kansas.”[11]

Buchanan and the Constitution

Although Congress would reject the Lecompton Constitution due to the slavery elements, James Buchanan could not interfere as it was not in the powers of the executive granted in the Constitution.  In 1861, Kansas became a free state. In looking at the situation in Kansas, James Buchanan’s actions were in accordance with the Constitution and his role as chief executive.  Since the Lecompton government was established by Congress it was the legal government in Buchanan’s eyes.  He recognized that voter fraud and violent intimidation had elected pro-slavery delegates that did not speak for the majority of Kansas.  It was for this reason that he urged them to have new elections which were fair.  When that advice fell on deaf ears, he sent federal troops to defend the rights of the people at the ballot box.  This action was taken as his support of the pro-slavery election results.  However, it gave the anti-slavery party the ability to vote in unbiased elections which would lead to their control of the government.  In the words of James Buchanan, “I have thus performed my duty on this important question, under a deep sense of responsibility to God and my country.”[12]

What do you think of James Buchanan’s actions during Bleeding Kansas?

[1]Irving Sloan, James Buchanan: 1791-1868, (New York: Oceana Publishers, 1968): 84.

[2]Michael F. Holt, Franklin Pierce, (New York: Times Books, 2010): 77. 

[3]James Buchanan, Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of Rebellion, (Scituate: Digital Scanning Inc, 1866/2009): 13. 

[4]Sloan, 35. 

[5]Buchanan, 18. 

[6]Buchanan, 18. 

[7]Buchanan, 24. 

[8]Sloan, 47. 

[9]Sloan, 47. 

[10]Sloan, 48. 

[11]Sloan, 49. 

[12]Buchanan, 26.

The Sad Story of America’s First Indiscriminate Mass Shooting

Mass shootings are sadly all too common in modern-day America, but they did not happen much at all a century ago. Here, Chuck Lyons recounts the sad story of the first indiscriminate mass shooting in US history. It took place in Winfield, Kansas in 1903 and the perpetrator was Gilbert Twigg.

A panorama of Winfield, Kansas from around 1910.

Early in the evening of August 13, 1903, thirty-six-year-old Gilbert Twigg parked his wagon in an alley near the corner of Main Street and Ninth Avenue in Winfield, Kansas. A large crowd had gathered there for an outdoor music concert. Wearing a buckskin hunting jacket, he walked to Ninth and Main. The band was taking a break and the crowd milled around talking. About a block from the bandstand, Twinge dropped to one knee, shouted “I’m going to shoot you all,” and opened fire with a shotgun. 

When he was done, nine people including Twigg himself, were dead. 

Gilbert Twigg had become the first indiscriminate mass killer in US history. He had acted without apparent motive and had killed whomever was handy. It was something the country had never seen before and would not see again for almost fifty years. Like many of today’s serial shooters he had served in the Armed Forces and had bought his guns legally. He also left a manifesto of 650 words of rationalization that explained little. 

“You should let this be a lesson to you in the future,” he wrote near its end.

Army veteran

Twigg had been born in Flintstone, Maryland in 1867 or 1868 and around 1888 had followed his uncle Argel to Kansas. There Twigg got a job as a miller and was said by people who knew him to be ambitious, intelligent, agreeable, and passably handsome, with “searing ice-blue eyes.” In those early days in Winfield, he worked, ran with a crowd of other young people, and courted a local woman, Jessie Hamilton, eventually proposing marriage and being accepted. But a short while after she accepted his proposal, for reasons that have never been clear, Hamilton changed her mind and broke off the engagement.

Her decision twisted something inside Twigg. 

“Those were the happiest days in my life,” he would write to a friend, Chance Wells, in 1902, “and it would have been much better for me if I had gotten married and settled down as you have done. I have no doubt but that you are very happy, while I am not.”

In 1896, two years after the thwarted love affair, Twigg enlisted in the army. He served two hitches and at one point was promoted because of his marksmanship. He saw action fighting in the Philippines where he also became involved in some sort of dispute with an officer and a doctor, Lt. Myron C. Bowdish and Contract Surgeon O. W. Woods, the details of which were never made public. But whatever had happened continued to haunt Twigg. He was mustered out of the army in California as a sergeant with an “excellent” service record and lived briefly in Montana working as a miller before returning to Winfield in 1903.

But things had changed, and Twigg was winding tighter.

In Winfield, he was unable to get his old job back or find any other employment probably because of his deteriorating mental condition. He was also reported to have lost his job in Montana “under murky circumstances.” He spent his days lolling around Winfield parks or sequestered in his boardinghouse room muttering about the people in Montana and Kansas who he thought had mistreated him and were plotting against him. 

Crazy Twigg

Local boys began calling him “Crazy Twigg.” 

Finally, on August 1, 1903, the twisting spring broke, and Twigg walked into the Winfield & Miller hardware store and bought a shotgun, an inexpensive .32 pistol, and more than 100 rounds of ammunition. He spent the next several days brushing up on the marksmanship he had learned in the Army. By August 13, he was ready. He piled his guns and ammunition into a tin express wagon and pulled it into the alley behind Ninth Avenue. Taking his shotgun, he began to walk to the Ninth and Main.

Along the way, The Winfield Chroniclelater reported, he ran into a group of local boys and allegedly told them he had some “tall shooting to do” and told them to get out of the area.

“I have no desire to hurt you,” the paper quoted him as saying.

At Ninth Avenue, he stopped in front of the Milligan Shoe Store, in sight of the bandstand and about a block away from it, and began firing. The band, Canton’s Dozen, a military band, was resting on the stage looking over sheet music. Twigg’s first shot grazed a horse that bolted and his second passed through the shoulder of the band’s drummer, Re Oliver, and shattered Clyde Wagoner's horn. Havoc erupted as Twigg kept firing into the crowd. Three men were hit as they exited onto the street from the stairway leading to the Odd Fellows Hall next door to Milligan’s. A group of three women were hit, and a 15-year-old boy. Bodies littered the street in growing pools of blood as Twigg continued firing on the scattering crowd. Some were running holding wounded arms or limping on shattered legs. Others were down in the street and moaning alongside the buildings.

Twigg had chosen the one evening of the week when the most people congregated, and “he chose the spot from which to fire with the skill of a general,” The Chroniclewrote. “He dropped on one knee at each fire, then retreated backward, while reloading, then dropped on his knee again and fired. These are the skirmish line tactics of the army and give a level `body line' to the volley. The employment of the tactics is due the terrible execution of his volleys. He remembered his training and `shot low.'”

Twigg worked his way back to the alley and his wagon. His last two shots were fired as he leaned around the corner. He then grabbed his .32 pistol from the wagon and turned it on himself. The whole incident had lasted less than ten minutes. Eight people, plus Twigg, died either immediately or shortly after the attack. More than two-dozen others had been wounded.

A rumor has persisted in Winfield for decades that Twigg did not shoot himself but was in fact killed by Winfield policeman George Nicholas, Winfield’s first and at that time only black policeman. “That rumor cast Nichols as a ready-made hero who ended the town’s most incomprehensible nightmare,” one historian wrote, “but [the town] was forced to deny his role because it was considered too dangerous for a black man to kill a white man, even justifiably.” 

For the rest of his life, Nicholas continued to deny he had shot Twigg.

The manifesto

The morning after the shooting, local police searched Twigg’s room and found a letter blaming unspecified individuals and the world at large for his troubles. 

"I would like to say to those who have interested themselves so much in my welfare (that seems to be the public in general),” he had written, “that I do not and most likely never will know the real cause of being treated in the manner in which I have been treated…You know you have `doped' me until I was forced to give up about a $100 a month position. You know that youdrove me from place to place and forced me to give up a neat little sum of my hard earned money to railroad companies, money that I went through the danger of war and diseases… You also know that you watched my mail and after finding out my friends and correspondents, you told them some kind of a story about me that caused everyone of them to drop me and turn me down cold.”

Was the cause of this persecution, he wondered, “my girl affaire here some eight or nine years ago? “ 

He also wrote that he regretted that “I did not settle this thing with Lieutenant Myron C. Bowdish and Contract surgeon O. W. Woods while I was a patient…in The Philippines. Then I could have gotten what was due me, and this thing would have been over long ago.”

The Winfield Chroniclewas surprisingly sympathetic to the man who had shot up its town and killed eight of its residents.

“Poor Twigg was not responsible for his insane acts. His disordered mind led him to the conclusion that the whole world was against him and he came back to the home of his boyhood to wreak vengeance and end it all,” it wrote on August 14, 1903.

There would not be another such attack in the United States until 1949, forty-six years later, when Howard Unruh wandered through his Camden, N.J., neighborhood killing twelve people. But by 2017, attacks such as Twigg’s were occurring with frightening regularly—and killing far more than the eight people Twigg had killed. 

“You should let this be a lesson to you in the future,” Twigg wrote in his manifesto, and he had indeed left a lesson for future generations.

But it was one we would be better off without.

Please share any comments or thoughts below.

ILLUSTRATIONS/LINKS

https://www.buzzfeed.com/sarahweinman/how-a-forgotten-1903-killing-spree-became-the-first-modern-m?utm_term=.gpJ6rlKVL#.iwWk8mEM1

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/kan-shooter-killed-9-1903-message-future-gunmen-article-1.2679033

A picture of Twigg can seen here: http://amok.wikia.com/wiki/Gilbert_Twigg