During the presidency of James Buchanan (1857-1861) the White House was the setting for the discussion of volatile national issues (the admittance of Kansas as a slave or free state, the Dred Scott decision, and secession) reflecting sectional interests in the years leading to the rupture of the Union in 1860. Buchanan, a historian wrote, was a northern man with southern principles, cautious and ready to compromise.

Although there was increased tension in Washington, where southerners were very involved in social life, the White House was the stage for glittering receptions and dinners.

Buchanan, the only president never to marry, chose his twenty-six-year-old niece, Harriet Lane, as his White House hostess. In 1852, she had accompanied her uncle to London, where he served as United States minister to Great Britain and had acquired knowledge of protocol and social amenities there. She came to the White House after a period in which several first ladies had been ill or not active in entertaining. The citizens of Washington welcomed her and her youthful gaiety.

In the last year of Buchanan's tenure, two delegations of important foreign guests came to America and were received and entertained in the White House. In May 1860, the first diplomatic delegation from Japan arrived, and in October of the same year, the nineteen-year-old Prince of Wales, who later became King Edward VII, was a house guest. Both visits elicited much interest and widespread newspaper coverage in the city and throughout the nation. The Japanese commented on the curious custom of permitting ladies to attend White House ceremonies; the Prince of Wales stayed long enough at a reception, one reporter wrote, "to form a good idea of the character of our Presidential receptions, their freedom from stilted etiquette, and the perfect equality which ignores social distinctions.

1 Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, October 20, 1860, 338.



James Buchanan .

James Buchanan was in temporary retirement at Wheatland, his Lancaster, Pennsylvania, home, when he sat for this portrait two years after serving as secretary of state under President James K. Polk (1845-1849). He had already had a long public career as a congressman (1821-1831) and senator (1834-1845) from Pennsylvania and United States minister to Russia (1832 -1833). This miniature is the first life portrait of Buchanan to be acquired by the White House.

Buchanan is shown at age sixty, six years before he assumed the presidency. He aspired unsuccessfully to the Democratic nomination for the presidency a year later, in 1852; the following year President Franklin Pierce appointed him United States minister to Great Britain. He was elected president in 1856, defeating the Republican candidate, John C. Fremont. Buchanan would be the last Democratic president until Grover Cleveland assumed office in 1885.

John Henry Brown, who was born in Lancaster and worked in Philadelphia, painted the miniature from a daguerreotype he took in 1851. He painted another miniature of Buchanan about 1865, and one of Harriet Lane Johnston in 1878; both are in the National Museum of American Art. He also went to Springfield, Illinois, in 1860 and completed a miniature of President-elect Lincoln (National Portrait Gallery). Brown, a great admirer of Buchanan, commented that he was "more attached to Mr. Buchanan than to any public man that I ever knew. "2

2. Henry Brown to Henry E. Johnston, December 22, 1876. Copy, National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.



Lane's Reception .

Before interior photography was perfected, sketches such as this were the basis for newspaper scenes of White House events. This drawing depicts a reception held in the Blue Room in February 1860 after the ceremonies dedicating Clark Mills’s statue of George Washington in Washington Circle. Harriet Lane is shown being introduced to a guest by the commissioner of public buildings, James B. Blake. On the reverse of the drawing the artist has noted, "All the ladies have on bonnets, cloaks, shawls & gentlemen divested of overcoats & hats in their hands. The room is oval & everything is blue and gold."

The room had recently been refurbished under the direction of Harriet Lane. New furniture made by Gottlieb Vollmer of Philadelphia is in evidence, as are candelabra bought by James Monroe in France in 1817. The overmantel mirror was purchased by President Franklin Pierce in 1853.

The drawing was executed in preparation for a wood engraving published in the March 10, 1860, issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Little is known about Albert Berghaus, who worked for Frank Leslie’s producing sketches and often reworking other artists’ illustrations in wood engravings. After the Civil War, he traveled in the West, and in the late 1870s he collaborated with Frederic Remington to illustrate "Tenting on the Plains," an account, possibly a magazine article, by Mrs. George Custer. The drawing was acquired at the sale of the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1996. She purchased it while she was first lady in 1962.



Cabinet .

Early twentieth-century accounts of historic objects in the White House attribute the origin of this cabinet to the gifts presented to President James Buchanan by the first diplomatic delegation from Japan in 1860.

The issues of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper with engravings of their visit show an elaborate box "containing the lacquered cabinet" and a sketchily drawn cabinet in a view of the gifts being unpacked by the Japanese delegation in a room in the Willard Hotel. However, Buchanan directed that those presents be deposited in the Patent Office, and neither he nor the aide who dealt with the gifts remembered anything being left in the White House. It is possible that the cabinet was brought back from Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1855 and presented to President Franklin Pierce, who exhibited the items to the public in the White House. The cabinet and the accompanying pieces--a lacquered rectangular table and a small box--are among the few objects which have remained in the White House since the mid-nineteenth century.

Whatever their provenance, the objects are excellent examples of Japanese craftsmanship of this period. If not of the finest work made for the Tokugawa palaces, they are of a quality appropriate for state gifts. Objects such as the cabinet were made for use in the family quarters of a private Japanese residence. Decorated in the maki-e (to sprinkle) style, the cabinet depicts landscapes with plum trees, blossoms and cranes in relief highlighted in gold leaf and gold powders.

I am grateful to Ann Yonemura, Curator of Japanese Art, the Freer Gallery of Art, for providing information on mid-nineteenth century Japanese lacquer objects.



The Center Divan .

Furniture in the Rococo Revival style favored by the Empress Eugenie, who married Napoleon III in 1853, became popular in America in the mid-nineteenth century. In France, a center divan was referred to as a "causeuse"--a place for small talk. This divan was placed in the middle of the Blue Room. In the center of the divan's top was a rich gilt vase-shaped ornament; later in the century, potted plants were placed there instead of the ornament. The suite was upholstered in blue brocatelle, and blue chintz covers were also ordered, probably for summer use.

Gottlieb Vollmer, born in Germany, came to the United States in 1832. He settled in Philadelphia and worked as an upholsterer and cabinetmaker. He developed a growing furniture business in the 1860s and owned it until his death in 1883. The bill of sale for the White House furniture, dated January 1, 1860, lists G. Vollmer as a manufactory of "fashionable furniture for parlor, chamber, dining or drawing room." He also supplied window curtains for the Blue Room and another suite of furniture for the Green Room in 1860.

This furniture remained in the Blue Room until 1902, when the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White designed a suite in the French Empire style for President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1937, the Vollmer furniture was removed from the White House for exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, except for the center divan, which remained in the White House.