From the office of state Sen. Lloyd Smucker:
In celebration of President’s Day, the James Buchanan Foundation, Lancaster County Historical Society and Senator Lloyd Smucker will host an interview with President James Buchanan on Monday, February 16, from 1 pm to 2 pm. The interview will be held at Wheatland, the Lancaster estate of the 15th President of the United States, located at 1120 Marietta Avenue in Lancaster.
Senator Smucker will interview President Buchanan, portrayed by retired Temple University professor Don Walters, on questions ranging from what Lancaster was like when he was president to his thoughts about the current occupant of the White House. Buchanan served as president of the United States from 1857 to 1861, prior to the secession of 11Southern states from the Union which led to the formation of the Confederacy and the beginning of the U.S. Civil War. After the interview there will be a time for questions from the audience.
2009 also marks the 200th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, Buchanan’s successor as President of the United States.
For more information please call the Wheatland, 392-8721, the Lancaster Historical Society, 392-4633 or Senator Smucker’s office, 397-1309.
Related news: A survey of historians conducted by the cable channel C-SPAN ranked Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, William Henry Harrison and Warren G. Harding the worst U.S. presidents. That’s nothing new. Buchanan brings up the bottom in every such survey. What I’d like to do here is drag out a thoughtful 2004 letter to the Sunday News from Sam Slaymaker, then the executive director of the James Buchanan Foundation for the Preservation of Wheatland.
Slaymaker comes to Buchanan’s defense:
It is time that we acknowledge that a president’s “greatness” is as much a factor of circumstances he must contend with as it is of any inherent personality traits. It would thus only be fair to rank presidents if they each faced the identical set of circumstances in office and were therefore on a level playing field. Obviously, such is not the case.
James Buchanan came to the White House at the culmination of a long and distinguished career of service to the United States, both at home and abroad. He had the most impressive resume of any president since John Quincy Adams. However, he was elected president with the nearly impossible task of holding together the rapidly dividing nation through compromise and conciliation at a time when a successful compromise over the issue of slavery was no longer possible.
Although his administration cannot be deemed to have been successful, the sole fault for this failure cannot fairly be laid at his feet. James Buchanan was a statesman of courage and integrity who knowingly chose to accept the challenge of serving his country in one of its darkest hours under circumstances that would most likely lead to personal defamation rather than to glory.
Lancastrians have every right to be proud of our state’s only president and of his beloved Lancaster home, Wheatland, which ranks as one of the best restored presidential sites in America.
