USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -He was elected five times to the House of Representatives; then, after an interlude as Minister to Russia, served for a decade in the Senate. He became Polk’s Secretary of State and Pierce’s Minister to Great Britain.

Detailed explanation-2: -James Buchanan was the 15th president of the United States (1857–61). A moderate Democrat well endowed with legal knowledge and experience in government, he lacked the soundness of judgment and conciliatory personality to deal effectively with the slavery crisis and failed to avert the American Civil War (1861–65).

Detailed explanation-3: -James M. Buchanan, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economic Science, developed a program that changed the way economists analyze economic and political decision-making. He examined how politicians’ self-interest and noneconomic forces affect government economic policy.

Detailed explanation-4: -Buchanan supported the theory that states and territories had a right to determine if they would allow slavery. (There were also reports Buchanan may have influenced the court’s ruling.) The Dred Scott decision angered and solidified Buchanan’s Republican opponents, and it drove a wedge into the Democratic Party.