What Democrats Can Learn From the Forgotten Impeachment of James Buchanan

A common and not altogether unreasonable objection to the Democratic House majority’s decision to pursue impeachment against President Donald Trump is that the outcome is foreordained in the GOP Senate. In 1868, when the House launched impeachment proceedings against Andrew Johnson, and 1974, when it did so against Richard Nixon, there was a clear path to securing conviction and removal of a sitting president. No such possibility exists today. So why squander time, resources and political capital on a process whose conclusion is already written?

It’s the same question that Republicans confronted in 1860—160 years ago—when they launched a sweeping investigation into James Buchanan, a Democratic president who they believed had undermined democratic norms and institutions, betrayed his Constitutional oath to uphold the sanctity of free elections and kept an administration that was rife with corruption at all levels.

Ostensibly focused on Buchanan’s extralegal machinations to secure slavery in the new state of Kansas, the House investigation uncovered a wide range of criminality that included straw jobs, extortion of federal officeholders and the bribing of multiple congressmen.

In the end, the proceedings didn’t succeed in kicking the president out of office: The Republican majority opted not to impeach Buchanan—his term was drawing to a close and he was not a candidate for re-election, anyway. But, in another sense, impeachment was a success: The hearings helped crystalize a powerful narrative about Democratic lawlessness that formed a basis of Abraham Lincoln’s winning bid for the White House.

The example of the Covode hearings (named for the committee’s chairman, John Covode) stands as a reminder that congressional investigations—even the most partisan of the lot—have long been a powerful instrument for framing complex, seemingly unrelated issues in a way that resonates with the electorate.

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Buchanan’s troubles began in the fall of 1859, when rumors began to swirl of corruption within his Democratic administration. A former Democratic congressman—now running for re-election as a Republican—claimed publicly that the president had attempted to bribe him in connection with an important vote. Other stories circulated in the partisan press of irregularities in federal contracts and dodgy no-show patronage jobs paid out to relatives of lawmakers. By March 1860, at least one Republican operative encouraged John Covode, a congressman from Pennsylvania and a sharp Buchanan critic, to “devote time when in Washington to framing all the points against the Administration, not only by parole but by written or printed proof.” Within weeks, the House Republican majority appointed a select committee of three Republicans and two Democrats to do just that.

While the Covode committee’s official charge was to investigate whether the president or his administration had “by money, patronage or other improper means” attempted to compel or buy congressional votes, at the heart of the matter was the country’s all-consuming struggle over whether to extend slavery into the territories.

In 1854, two years before Buchanan was elected president, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which organized the Kansas and Nebraska territories in preparation for statehood. At the demand of Southern senators, Stephen Douglas, the lead author of the bill, inserted a “popular sovereignty” provision empowering residents of the territories to decide whether to enter the Union as slave or free states. The provision effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited slavery above the 36’30” parallel in land acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase. This act brought to a boil a long-simmering debate over slavery.

On its own merits alone, the bill was deeply controversial. William Pitt Fessenden, a moderate Whig senator from Maine, regarded it as “a terrible outrage. … The more I look at it the more enraged I become. It needs but little to make me an out & out abolitionist.” But successive Democratic administrations—first under President Franklin Pierce, then under James Buchanan—also made a mockery of the popular sovereignty that the bill stipulated.

For two years, pro-slavery militias made up mostly of Missourians crossed into Kansas and ran roughshod through the territory, employing violence and fraud to rig a series of legislative elections. When they were not stuffing ballot boxes, the Missourians were assaulting free-soil men. They abducted William Moore, a Methodist preacher, and poured alcohol down his throat. They shot, tarred and feathered, and threatened to kill other antislavery clergymen. As a result, free-soilers, who probably comprised a healthy majority of the population, armed themselves to the teeth and refused to acknowledge the authority of the official territorial government in Lecompton. Fighting between free-soilers and pro-slavery settlers grew so violent that the territory became widely known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

Two days after Buchanan took the oath of office in March 1857, the United States Supreme Court poured gasoline on fire with its historic decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford. Scott was a 62-year-old slave who in the 1830s had accompanied his owner on extended sojourns in Illinois and Minnesota—the latter still a territory, and part of the original Louisiana Purchase. With support from white abolitionists, he sued for freedom on the premise that his enslavement effectively ended the moment that his master took him onto free territorial soil. Chief Justice Roger Taney, a Maryland slave owner, could very well have crafted a narrow decision rejecting either the court’s jurisdiction in the case, or Scott’s standing to sue, but instead drafted a ruling that established the right of every citizen to bring his property, including slaves, into federal territories. The ruling rendered popular sovereignty a moot point, as neither Congress nor the residents of a territory could restrict slavery prior to statehood. Slaveowners would be encouraged to overrun places like Kansas and Nebraska and stack the deck. Moreover, the decision raised an inescapable question: If citizens were entitled to bring their “property” into federal territories, could they not also bring their slaves into free states?

The Buchanan administration added to the pain when it endorsed the so-called Lecompton Constitution—the work of a Kansas convention elected by outright fraud and violence. Adopted by a popular referendum that was equally fraudulent, the constitution formed the territorial government’s official application for statehood. It was during the congressional debate over whether to admit Kansas, with slavery, that Buchanan allegedly plied all manner of illegal means to secure votes from wavering northern Democrats who feared popular backlash from an electorate deeply opposed to adding a new slave state to the Union.

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At Buchanan’s inauguration, the incoming president had been observed whispering in quiet conversation with Roger Taney, shortly before the chief justice administered the oath of office. Running against Douglas for the United States Senate in 1858, Lincoln channeled popular suspicion into a new theory—that Pierce, Buchanan, Taney and Douglas were engaged in a long-game conspiracy to foist slavery on free states in the North. Kansas was the first rung on a ladder that led inevitably to the nationalization of the peculiar institution.

“We cannot absolutely know” that the plan was premeditated, Lincoln offered, “but when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance—and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places … in such a case we feel it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin, and Roger and James, all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn before the first blow was struck.”

By the time the Covode committee took up its work, this idea had become common understanding among Republican critics of the administration. Working backward, the GOP majority sought to establish that the manifest corruption in the Buchanan administration served a darker purpose—securing congressional approval of the Lecompton Constitution as a first step toward expanding slavery northward.

If their theory of the case was speculative, the committee members had little trouble unearthing evidence of wrongdoing. Previous administrations had used patronage and procurement to whip votes and build statewide party organizations, but Buchanan took the practice to a new level. His War Department handed out jobs and business to relatives of wavering congressmen, sold property at below-market rates to business consortia connected to influential Democrats and awarded contracts at inflated rates to the same. Interior Department employees were deployed to Kansas to disperse funds during territorial elections. The Navy Department purchased coal from a company that provided kickbacks to the national party. Federal officeholders were required to tithe part of their pay for congressional campaigns. In Philadelphia, the federal Custom House had devolved into a patronage mill for no-show political appointees.

For several weeks, the committee heard spectacular testimony from cabinet members, low-level officeholders and even star witnesses like John Forney, a newspaperman and one-time Democrat who turned on the administration when it awarded a printing contract to a rival business.

The committee never found what today we’d call a “smoking gun”—proof of a systematic and deliberate plot to foist slavery on the free states. But the corruption it unearthed—all in the service of securing votes for the admission of Kansas as a slave state—reinforced the very plot line that Lincoln had introduced in his 1858 Senate race.

Predictably, the country was sharply divided over the Covode investigation. At least since the early Federalist era, when supporters of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson founded dueling national newspapers, American periodicals tended to assume avowedly partisan positions, drawing little distinction between news and editorials. By mid-century, 95 percent of daily and weekly newspapers were affiliated with one party or another, leading a contemporary to claim that “no political paper in the United States can be independent and live. It may, in some cases, be independent of persons, but never of party principles and party fealty.”

No less than today, people viewed politics through the prism of party. Thus, in Covode’s hometown, the Pittsburgh Gazette staunchly toed the Republican line and reported the committee’s work uncritically, while the Pittsburgh Post, an administration organ, argued that “In Pennsylvania where John Covode is known, it is regarded as an excellent joke to put him on a committee of political vice an immorality.” Over a century and a half before Americans turned to Fox News and MSNBC for dueling interpretations of the same events, their forebearers were already sharply divided in how they received and interpreted the day’s news.

Meanwhile, Buchanan, in two messages to Congress, truculently denounced the Covode committee. He regarded the House Republican majority as treasonous—in cahoots with the radical abolitionist John Brown—and did little to assuage the fears of moderate voters who cared little for slaves but still resisted the institution’s spread westward or northward.

Little wonder, then, that Buchanan denied Congress’ authority to launch a “blanket” investigation and claimed that only the Judiciary Committee enjoyed jurisdiction over the executive branch—and then, only if it undertook a formal impeachment inquiry. “I defy all investigations,” the president proclaimed. “Nothing but perjury can sully my name.”

That didn’t stop the committee from drawing blood. In the end, the House majority declined to impeach James Buchanan. He was a lame duck, having signaled his disinterest in serving a second term. And in any event, the Democratic-controlled Senate was sure to acquit in the event of a trial. But the hearings proved an important asset for the Republican Party as it entered the 1860 election cycle. The committee’s majority report earned wide coverage in the partisan press, galvanizing Republican voters and converts, and during the fall canvass, party faithful distributed thousands of copies of a sensationalist pamphlet entitled “The Ruin in the Democratic Party: Reports of the Covode and Other Committees.”

It would be a stretch to claim that Covode’s investigation shifted the electoral tide. Lincoln’s victory—and the Republican sweep in northern congressional and statewide campaigns—was the culmination of multiple political currents converging at the right moment. But the committee’s work did weave a critical narrative out of disparate strands. It helped voters in Midwestern swing states—Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania—draw meaningful connections between the Democratic Party’s financial and political corruption and the tangled, often complicated fight over slavery. It reduced seemingly different stories to a powerful meta narrative in which Democrats were willing to break any law, violate any norm or leverage any tool in their single-minded pursuit of slavery’s extension.

The knock against congressional committee investigations is that they are all for show. Particularly when the outcome is a given—as was the case in 1860, when House Republicans understood from the start that they would not likely impeach the president—it serves no immediate purpose to parade witnesses before a toothless panel.

But at certain moments in American history, Congress has reshaped the public narrative in ways that influenced future events. Such was the case in 1860, when John Covode and his colleagues provided the country with a damning view of corruption and conspiracy. Such may still be the case today.