Before Ulysses Grant became President, some made comparisons to George Washington, and how one great general became a great president, though this wasn't always the case. The esteem that many held Grant in lessened when it became known that many of Grant's friends, who had been appointed to positions of responsibility in his administration, were ( Read more... )

Andrew Johnson left office as President despised by many. His successor Ulysses Grant refused to ride in the same carriage as Johnson on the way to the inauguration, and although Johnson had survived an impeachment attempt, he was leaving office as a lame duck President. It didn't make him any more popular with the majority Republicans in Congress ( Read more... )

James Buchanan attended Abraham Lincoln's inauguration, and he left his successor a mess. As Buchanan rode in a carriage with Abraham Lincoln to Lincoln's inauguration, Buchanan is said to have remarked, “My dear sir, if you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland, you are a happy man indeed.”

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It's almost a certainty that Franklin Pierce was an alcoholic. He died from cirrhosis of the liver, and he is quoted as saying "after being President, there's nothing left to do but get drunk." Whether this quote is authentic or apocryphal, the sentiment expressed in it appears to match Pierce's post-presidential life.

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Martin Van Buren served only one term as President. He lost his bid for re-election largely because the fiscal policies of his predecessor Andrew Jackson had led to a great recession known as the Panic of 1837, and because the Whigs ran a slick campaign against him, painting him as aristocratic and out of touch. At the end of his term, Van Buren ( Read more... )

In November of 2019 the theme of this community was impeachment and as we concluded at the end of that series, the constitutional process of impeachment has become as much of a political process as it has a legal one. History has shown that during times of intense political polarization, impeachment can be used by one side in an attempt to ( Read more... )

President Andrew Johnson's time in Washington in the mid-1860s could not have been filled will happy memories. First he had to face the danger of being a Unionist in a Confederate state during the civil war, something that created both intense personal unpopularity and physical danger to him and his family. Then in 1864, when he was elected as Vice ( Read more... )

In the time immediately preceding the 1864 election, Abraham Lincoln thought he would be a one term president. The war was taking longer than everyone had expected, and the mounting casualties made the Democratic Party message of a negotiated peace sound more appealing. The Republican Party was split between the Radical Republicans and the ( Read more... )

Perhaps the most difficult presidential transition in history took place in 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected to succeed James Buchanan. It was a time when sectional strife and division rose to such a high level that it split the Democratic Party and caused many to worry that the president-elect would not live to see his inauguration.


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James Buchanan was the third in a series of "doughface" presidents. Hailing from Pennsylvania, Buchanan's biographer Jean Baker theorizes that Buchanan was "an intellectual and electoral hostage" to the South, and was so enamored with the ways of the south that he let ideology trump pragmatism. Secession began on his watch, and Buchanan is ( Read more... )