JAMES BUCHANAN . 1857-1861

Tall, stately, stiffly formal in the high stock he wore around his jowls, James Buchanan was the only president who never married. Born in Cove Gap, Pennsylvania, on April 23,1791, Buchanan, a graduate of Dickinson College, was learned in the law. After being elected five times to the House of Representatives, he served for a decade in the Senate. He became Polk's secretary of state and Pierce's minister to Great Britain. Service abroad helped to bring Buchanan the Democratic nomination in 1856 because it had exempted him from involvement in bitter domestic controversies.

As president-elect, he thought the crisis would disappear if he maintained a sectional balance in his appointments and could persuade the people to accept constitutional law as the Supreme Court interpreted it. The Court was considering the legality of restricting slavery in the territories, and two justices hinted to Buchanan what the decision would be. Thus, in his inaugural the president referred to the territorial question as " a matter of but little practical importance" since the Court was about to settle it "speedily and finally."

Two days later the Court delivered the Dred Scott decision, asserting that Congress had no constitutional power to deprive persons of their property rights in slaves in the territories. Southerners were delighted, but the decision created a furor in the North.

When Republicans won a plurality in the House in 1858, every significant bill they passed fell before southern votes in the Senate or a presidential veto. The government reached a stalemate. Sectional strife rose to such a pitch in 1860 that the Democratic Party split into northern and southern wings, each nominating its own candidate for the presidency. When the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln, it was a foregone conclusion that he would be elected even though his name appeared on no southern ballot. Rather than accept a Republican administration, the southern "fire-eaters" advocated secession. President Buchanan, dismayed and hesitant, denied the legal right of states to secede but held that the Federal Government legally could not prevent them. He hoped for compromise, but secessionist leaders did not want compromise.

Then Buchanan took a more militant tack. As several cabinet members resigned, he appointed northerners, and sent the Star of the West to carry reinforcements to Fort Sumter. On January 9, 1861, the vessel was fired upon and driven away.

Buchanan reverted to a policy of inactivity that continued until he left office. In March1861 he retired to his Pennsylvania home Wheatland - where he died seven years later - leaving his successor to resolve the frightful issue facing the nation.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN . 1861-1865

Abraham Lincoln warned the South in his inaugural address: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war."

Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on the states for 75,000 volunteers. The Civil War had begun.

Born February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky, Lincoln was a frontiersman’s son, and had to struggle for a living. He made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm and keeping a store in Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many years. In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for senator. He lost the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for president in 1860.

As president, he built the Republican Party into a strong national organization. He rallied northern Democrats to the Union cause. On Jan. 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared slaves forever free. In dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Lincoln stated, "we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

He won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to the war. In his planning for peace, the president was flexible and generous, encouraging southerners to lay down their arms and join speedily in reunion. The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his second inaugural address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.:

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds . . .. "

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor who somehow thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.

ANDREW JOHNSON . 1865-1869

With the assassination of Lincoln, the presidency fell to a southern Jacksonian Democrat of pronounced states' rights views. Andrew Johnson was a most unfortunate president. Set against him were the Radical Republicans in Congress, brilliantly led and ruthless in their tactics. Johnson was no match for them.

Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, on December 29, 1808, Johnson grew up in poverty. He ran a tailor shop in Tennessee. In local debates, he championed the common man and vilified the plantation aristocracy. In the 1840s and 50s, as a member of the House and the Senate, he advocated a homestead bill to provide a free farm for the poor man.

Johnson remained in the Senate even when Tennessee seceded, making him a hero in the North. Lincoln appointed him governor of Tennessee. Republicans, contending that their Party was for all loyal men, nominated the southern Democrat for vice president in 1864.

After Lincoln's death, President Johnson proceeded to reconstruct the former Confederate States while Congress was not in session. By the time Congress met in December 1865, slavery was being abolished. But "black codes" regulating the freedmen were starting to appear. Radical Republicans in Congress, dismayed at restrictions imposed upon blacks, moved to change Johnson's program. Refusing to seat any representative or senator from the old Confederacy, they passed measures dealing with freedmen. Johnson vetoed the legislation. Congress overrode his veto to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866, establishing Negroes as American citizens and forbidding any discrimination against them.

A few months later Congress submitted to the states the Fourteenth Amendment, which specified that no state should "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." All the former Confederate States except Tennessee refused to ratify the amendment, and there were two bloody race riots in the South. The Radical Republicans won an overwhelming victory in congressional elections that fall.

In March 1867, the Radicals effected their own plan of Reconstruction, again placing southern states under military rule. They also passed laws placing restrictions upon the president. When Johnson allegedly violated one of these, the Tenure of Office Act, by dismissing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, the House voted eleven articles of impeachment against him. He was tried by the Senate in the spring of 1868 and acquitted by one vote.

In 1875, Tennessee returned Johnson to the Senate. He died a few months later.

ULYSSES S. GRANT . 1869-1877

Late in the administration of Andrew Johnson, General Ulysses S. Grant aligned himself with the Radical Republicans. He was, as the symbol of Union victory during the Civil War, their logical candidate for President in 1868.

Born on April 27,1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio, Grant was the son of a tanner. Graduated from West Point, he fought in the Mexican War under General Zachary Taylor. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Grant was appointed commander of a volunteer regiment. By September 1861, Grant was brigadier general of volunteers. In February 1862, he took Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. In April, Grant, now a major general of volunteers, fought a bloody battle at Shiloh and came out less well. President Lincoln fended off demands for his removal by saying, "I can't spare this man - he fights."

For his next major objective, Grant maneuvered and fought skillfully to win Vicksburg, the key city on the Mississippi, and thus cut the Confederacy in two. Then he broke the Confederate hold on Chattanooga. Lincoln appointed him general-in-chief in March 1864. Grant directed Sherman to drive through the South while he himself, with the Army of the Potomac, pinned down General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.

Finally, on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House, Lee surrendered. Grant wrote out magnanimous terms of surrender that would prevent treason trials.

As president, Grant presided over the government much as he had run the army. Indeed he brought part of his army staff to the White House. He allowed Radical Reconstruction to run its course in the South, bolstering it at times with military force. Although a man of scrupulous honesty, Grant mistakenly associated with speculators. He uncovered their plan to corner the gold market, but was too late to stop the havoc it wrought on business.

During his campaign for re-election in 1872, Grant was attacked by Liberal Republican reformers. He called them "narrow-headed men," their eyes so close together that "they can look out of the same gimlet hole without winking." The General's friends in the Republican Party came to be known proudly as "the Old Guard."

After retiring from the presidency, Grant became a partner in a financial firm, which went bankrupt. About that time he learned that he had cancer of the throat. He started writing his recollections to pay off his debts and provide for his family, racing against death to produce a memoir that ultimately earned nearly $450,000. Soon after completing the last page, in 1885, he died.