When South Carolina seceded in December 1860, just over a month after Lincoln’s election, Buchanan denied that a state had a constitutional right to secede, prompting hostile reactions from southern politicians and newspaper editors. But he also denied that the federal government had the right under the Constitution’s enumerated powers to do anything about it. By the end of his term on March 4, 1861, seven states had left the Union, and Buchanan’s inaction had provided them time to organize their new nation and its defense.
But Buchanan’s failures involved more than just passivity. Before Lincoln’s election, when General Winfield Scott, head of the U.S. Army, urged Buchanan to transfer additional troops to federal military installations in the South, Buchanan refused. He openly received commissioners from South Carolina after its secession, seeking to negotiate with those he should more properly have treated as traitors. Yet he angered Confederate leaders with an unsuccessful effort in January 1861 to resupply Union forces at Fort Sumter. When the South seized federal property−post offices, courtrooms, forts−Buchanan offered no federal response. As secession gained momentum, his conciliatory attitudes and ongoing connections with prominent southern politicians encouraged resistance and led many Confederate supporters to believe their departure was all but risk-free. They were lulled into convincing themselves that war was unimaginable.
In January 1861, when South Carolinians fired on a ship bringing men and supplies to Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, Buchanan gave no order to respond to this act of war. Perhaps his close ties to southerners in his cabinet and in Congress led him to imagine that the mounting tensions could be managed and mitigated as North-South conflicts had been over the course of his long political career. Perhaps his decades of experience had taught him exactly the wrong lesson. This time would be different, and Buchanan would leave office and return to his Pennsylvania home in shame. Although he supported the Union when war broke out, he regularly received threats and hate mail. The U.S. Senate considered a resolution of condemnation for his failures during the secession winter, but it never passed.