So originally, my essay concept for the final two presidents before Lincoln was to have Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan arguing about who was the worst president.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: Most historians, James Buch, rank you last.
JAMES BUCHANAN: That's only because you, Frank Pierce, get the sympathy boost from your son dying right before you took office.
But I realized it would be funnier if instead, they were fighting over who got to be the worst president.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: I was bad from day one. I was practically a juvenile delinquent.
JAMES BUCHANAN: You were nowhere near as ill-adjusted as I was.
Then I thought, wait, wouldn't it be even funnier if these two guys everyone loves to hate were having this whole argument in the Gen Z slang everyone loves to hate? Like they were hanging out in the afterlife with a bunch of teens?
FRANKLIN PIERCE: I was so not-it, sis. I used to sneak out of my dorm at Bowdoin to get hammered.
JAMES BUCHANAN: I got booted from Dickinson, no cap.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: You were a bandwagon delinquent. Besides, Dickie let you back in.
I had to do some texting with the kids of various friends to confirm aspects of the lingo, but it definitely had possibilities.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: After I got married, I benched my wife and ran around getting krunk with my fam.
JAMES BUCHANAN: I got engaged to a gal whose dad had hella skrilla but she saw the red flags and ghosted me. Then she died of sus causes after I was seen vibing with some other snacc.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: You're cappin'.
JAMES BUCHANAN: But for reals?-- the ladies gave me the ick. I breadcrumbed 'em, though. It was a better look than just, women--cringe.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: Still cappin'.
For a while it seemed to be going really well. The Gen Z slang even sort of blended in with the nineteenth-century slang.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: I was a Chad and a diva. I resigned my Senate seat in a snit a year early when the Whigs took over Congress and the White House.
JAMES BUCHANAN: I was a humbugger who went Hollywood. I copied the Southern airs of my roommate and bestie, William Rufus King. We were so tight we were known as Miss Fancy and Aunt Nancy.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: People said I was "the hero of many a hard-fought bottle."
But weirdly, it was actually difficult to nail down facts about these two. The biographical material felt sloppier than it was for previous presidents. Books I read contradicted each other.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: I came up with the idea for the gag rule where we would receive antislavery petitions and then immediately table them, so that it didn't seem like we were violating the people's right of petition, even though we were.
JAMES BUCHANAN: I came up with the whole idea for the gag rule. Oh wait, maybe I didn't. Actually, I spoke out against the gag rule in the Senate. Even though everyone says I always sided with slaveholders. Wait, what?
FRANKLIN PIERCE: I was a simp to the slave states. Unless I was just backed into a corner.
JAMES BUCHANAN: I was the first gay president. Or not. Or maybe that word doesn't even make sense in the context of my era. Maybe we could call me queer?
FRANKLIN PIERCE: I'm pretty sure I own that gag rule thing?
As long as I stuck to stupid trivia about these guys, the whole premise worked fine.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: People called me Handsome Frank. I only got elected because I had mad riz.
JAMES BUCHANAN: At least you had BDE. I had a squinty eye and a dadbod.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: Miss Fancy always had the fits though. Givin' the Zaddy.
JAMES BUCHANAN: I only got elected because I threw dank parties.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: Your parties were fire, my G.
But when it came to things of substance--the real reasons these guys rank so low in every poll of presidential scholars--the whole gimmick started to fall apart.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: I was hella out of pocket as president. I signed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill that let new states decide whether or not to legalize slavery, which meant pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions started literally capping each other. Only in Ohio!
JAMES BUCHANAN: I encouraged the Supreme Court to broaden the Dred Scott decision because I thought it would chill folks to deny black people the rights of citizenship. But when they realized that every state was basically a slave state, peeps went cray cray.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: When two rival governments were elected in Bleeding Kansas, I sided with the pro-slavery one, even though it was voted in by a bunch of Missouri slavery stans who flooded the state on election day.
JAMES BUCHANAN: I sided with the pro-slavery Lecompton government too, and tried to gaslight Congress into approving their constitution. Also, under my administration, the economy collapsed.
See? Not working. Because it's not funny anymore. Bleeding Kansas isn't funny. Dred Scott is too horrific to laugh at. And to be dead honest, by this point in my own project, I have gotten really sick of reading and writing about slavery. But there's no alternative: slavery tainted everything in our early republic. It's still tainting things, as long as people are trying to prevent teachers from telling kids that slavery tainted everything. Honestly, I've started to feel like Senator Thomas Hart Benton when he compared how slavery slimed everything to the Biblical plague of frogs.
THOMAS HART BENTON: You could not look upon the table but there were frogs. You could not sit down at the banquet but there were frogs. You could not go to the bridal couch and lift the sheets but there were frogs. We can see nothing, touch nothing, have no measures proposed, without having this pestilence thrust before us.
So here's the thing. It's easy to make fun of Handsome Frank and Miss Fancy, because of their constant compromises with the increasingly belligerent proslavery faction.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: I called up federal troops to hand over a man named Anthony Burns to a Virginia slaveowner after a crowd got violent trying to free him.
JAMES BUCHANAN: I pushed relentlessly for slavery's expansion into the territories, and tried to buy Cuba as a new slave state.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: I nearly got a Senator killed. After Charles Sumner made a speech denouncing my Kansas debacle, Southern Senator Preston Brooks beat him to the brink of death with a cane on the Senate floor. Peeps in my own hometown burned me in effigy.
JAMES BUCHANAN: Oof.
But by the time these guys were elected, they were hamstrung by the whole history of appeasing the slave states that started with the Constitution. Beginning with the three-fifths compromise, the proslavery faction had been given outsized influence, and they used it nonstop to push for more, all the while complaining that they were the aggrieved ones. Pierce and Buchanan could not escape the frogs; the frogs were everywhere. The frogs had tied their hands. And they knew it.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: The depresh had me for my whole term. I couldn't ever take a stand.
JAMES BUCHANAN: After Lincoln was elected and Southern states started screaming secession, I basically had a menty B. I begged South Carolina to wait until Lincoln took office to secede.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: By then I was back in New Hampshire but still triggering people. I figured a lot of northerners would take up arms against each other rather than fight the South, and I wrote a letter saying so to Jefferson Davis. When Union troops later found that letter, I got canceled. Total NPC.
JAMES BUCHANAN: I let my disloyal Southern Cabinet members finesse me even though they were spilling tea to the South. My own Secretary of War was caught in 4K embezzling. Then he ran off and became a Confederate general.
So yeah, these two suck, but the question we need to ask is: who let the frogs out? Who let slavery plague the nation? Florida might cancel me for saying so, but the answer is: the founders. In 1776, no one was making the absurd claim--as they were in 1850--that slavery was a positive good. Everyone, even slave-owners, knew it was morally wrong. That's why the framers made a point of not mentioning it by name in the Constitution. And yet, bowing to minority pressure, they not only let slavery survive in the nation's founding document, but they gave a disproportionate voice to its beneficiaries.
And even after that, so many opportunities were missed. George Washington, who created the office of president, could have set the example of freeing his slaves. John Adams could have amplified his wife Abigail's voice, when she asked how Americans could "fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have." Thomas Jefferson could have tried to demand a better future for his own children, for pete's sake, instead of coming up with weird formulas in his diary to prove they were pretty much white. (Yes, he did that.) If we find it easy to call out Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, we should find it even easier to call out the republic's so-called great men. They were the ones who had a chance. And they were the ones who failed.
I hate to say it, fam, but for me, this time around, American history hits different: it seems like we're letting the non-playable characters take most of the blame for the L.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: In the end, even my friend Nathaniel Hawthorne dragged me. After glazing me in my campaign bio, he said "it took a romancer to do it."
JAMES BUCHANAN: Congress refused to pay for my presidential portrait.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: Fats devo!
JAMES BUCHANAN: There was one time when I didn't understand the assignment. I could have done something that would guarantee my rank as worst.president.ever. I could have killed President Lincoln! But I didn't. I fell off. On my way out the door, I warned him not to drink from the White House well.
FRANKLIN PIERCE: Weird flex, but ok.
Fourteen and Fifteen