James Buchanan grew up a few miles from where you're reading this. He reached the highest office in the land - and then presided over one of the worst moments in American history. Here's the full story.

On April 23, 1791, in a one-room log cabin near Cove Gap - a mountain pass in what is now western Franklin County, just over Lancaster County's border - James Buchanan Jr. was born to James Buchanan Sr. and Elizabeth Speer.

His father had emigrated from County Donegal, Ireland, and built a modest trading post at the foot of Stony Batter, hauling goods across the mountain gap.

It was frontier life, spare and practical.

The family didn't stay on the frontier long. When James was about ten, they moved east to Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, a small town where his father's business had grown into a more established store.

The Buchanans were now solidly middle class - respectable Presbyterians, ambitious, and determined to give their eldest son a proper education.

Young James was sent to the Old Stone Academy in Mercersburg, and then, at sixteen, to Dickinson College in Carlisle - about an hour's drive from Lancaster today, though in 1807 it might as well have been a different world.

Buchanan arrived at Dickinson with outsized confidence. He was smart, he knew it, and he made no particular effort to hide it.

According to his own later recollections, he was nearly expelled for "disorderly conduct" and general rowdiness in his first year.

He straightened up, graduated with honors in 1809, and never looked back. By the time he was twenty-three, he had passed the Pennsylvania bar.

By twenty-four, he had won his first election to the state legislature. Lancaster was about to get a new resident - and a new power player.

Buchanan set up his law practice in Lancaster in 1812, the same year the United States declared war on Great Britain.

He was twenty-one years old, newly admitted to the bar, and quickly building a reputation as a formidable courtroom presence.

Lancaster in 1812 was already a significant city - it had served as the state capital, it sat at the crossroads of major trade routes, and its population was a mix of German settlers, Scots-Irish merchants, free Black residents, and English landowners.

It was, in short, a place where politics mattered and where a sharp young lawyer could go very far.

Buchanan thrived. Within a few years his law practice was one of the most profitable in central Pennsylvania.

He represented banks, corporations, and wealthy landowners - and he was good enough at it that he could, by his mid-thirties, afford to purchase Wheatland, the elegant Federal-style mansion just west of the city that he would call home for the rest of his life.

Wheatland still stands today at 1120 Marietta Avenue. If you've driven past it, you've passed the home of a U.S. president.

His political rise was nearly as swift as his legal one. He served in the Pennsylvania legislature, then as a U.S. Congressman for five terms, then as U.S. Minister to Russia under Andrew Jackson, then as a U.S. Senator, then as Secretary of State under James K. Polk, then as U.S. Minister to Great Britain under Franklin Pierce. Each post was a step up. Each step was deliberate.

He ran for president three times before finally winning it in 1856 - the first (and, to this day, the only) Pennsylvanian ever elected to the presidency, and the only president to hail from Lancaster County.

Before any of that, there was Ann Coleman.

In 1819, Buchanan was engaged to Ann Coleman, the daughter of Robert Coleman - Lancaster's wealthiest man, an ironmaster who had built his fortune in the county's iron furnaces and whose family name still echoes through local history.

Ann was by all accounts intelligent and spirited. Buchanan was clearly in love with her. The engagement seemed settled.

Then, in December of that year, Ann broke off the engagement. The reasons were never fully made public.

Rumors circulated: Buchanan had been spending too much time with other women (probably in a purely social context), and Ann - high-strung and prone to anxiety, by contemporary accounts - interpreted it as indifference or infidelity.

A week after breaking the engagement, Ann Coleman died suddenly in Philadelphia. The cause was listed, obliquely, as "hysterical convulsions."

Many historians believe it was a deliberate overdose of laudanum.

Buchanan was devastated. He wrote a heartbroken letter to her father asking to be allowed to attend her funeral.

Robert Coleman returned the letter unopened.

Buchanan never married. He remains the only bachelor president in American history. For the rest of his life, he rarely spoke of Ann Coleman.

When he did, it was with unmistakable grief.

Some biographers argue that this loss shaped everything: his emotional guardedness, his tendency to avoid decisive confrontation, his preference for political maneuvering over direct engagement.

Whether or not that's true, it is one of the sadder threads running through an otherwise outwardly successful life.

By 1856, the United States was a country tearing itself apart over slavery. The Missouri Compromise had collapsed.

Bleeding Kansas was in open violence.

The Democratic Party was fracturing.

The new Republican Party had just run its first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, on a free-soil platform. The nation was combustible.

Into this walked James Buchanan - a man with four decades of political experience, a reputation as a steady hand, and the great advantage, as a diplomat in London for the past four years, of having been entirely absent from the Kansas-Nebraska fiasco.

He was the compromise candidate in every sense of the word.

He won. The electoral math worked out: he carried every Southern state plus Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, New Jersey, and California.

He beat Frémont comfortably. He was sixty-five years old, a Lancastrian, and now the president of the United States.

His inaugural address was soothing. He promised to be a one-term president (he kept that promise).

He declared that the slavery question would soon be settled by the Supreme Court - which, two days later, handed down the Dred Scott decision, ruling that Black Americans had no constitutional rights and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories.

The decision didn't settle anything. It poured gasoline on the fire.

Historians have since noted that Buchanan had privately lobbied justices before the decision was announced - that he knew what was coming and hoped it would resolve the national crisis. It did not. It is generally considered one of the most catastrophic miscalculations in presidential history.

The Buchanan presidency, from 1857 to 1861, is studied today primarily as a case study in what not to do when the nation you are leading is headed toward civil war.

The Lecompton Constitution crisis consumed his first two years.

Kansas, in the grip of pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions, had produced a fraudulent constitution designed to bring the territory into the Union as a slave state.

Buchanan backed it. His own party split.

Senator Stephen Douglas - the man who had crafted the Kansas-Nebraska Act - turned against Buchanan publicly. The fight ended with Kansas rejecting the Lecompton Constitution, but the damage to Buchanan's credibility and the Democratic Party's unity was severe.

The Panic of 1857, a serious financial crisis, hit the Northern economy hard. Buchanan's response was largely passive - he was ideologically opposed to federal intervention in economic affairs. The panic deepened sectional resentments.

In October 1859, John Brown raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to spark a slave rebellion.

Brown was captured, tried, and hanged. The raid terrified the South and electrified the North. The country's temperature rose another degree.

In November 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president.

Within weeks, South Carolina seceded from the Union. By the time Buchanan left office on March 4, 1861, seven states had seceded.

The Confederacy had been formed. Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated as its president.

What did Buchanan do?

He said he believed secession was unconstitutional but also believed the federal government had no legal power to stop it.

He did almost nothing.

He refused to reinforce Fort Sumter - the federal garrison in Charleston Harbor that would become the flashpoint of the war - in a way that might have changed the calculus.

He watched the country come apart and argued that it was not his job to put it back together.

Lincoln arrived in Washington for his inauguration to find the Union in pieces. He never forgave Buchanan for it.

Neither, largely, has history.

Buchanan returned to Lancaster in March 1861, relieved to be done with Washington and apparently convinced that history would eventually vindicate him.

He was wrong about that, at least in the short term.

As the Civil War unfolded, Buchanan became a figure of public contempt in the North. His house was reportedly mobbed on occasion.

He received hate mail.

Newspapers blamed him, sometimes fairly and sometimes hyperbolically, for the bloodshed that Lincoln was now presiding over.

His response was to write a book. In 1866 he published Mr. Buchanan's Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion, a careful, somewhat lawyerly defense of his conduct in office.

He maintained that he had followed the Constitution as he understood it.

He maintained that the war was not his fault. He maintained these things clearly, consistently, and to an audience that mostly wasn't listening.

He lived at Wheatland until his death on June 1, 1868, at the age of seventy-seven. He died of pneumonia, reportedly saying, "I have always felt and still feel that I discharged every duty imposed on me conscientiously. I have no regret for any public act of my life."

He is buried at Woodward Hill Cemetery, right here in Lancaster. It's worth a visit - the gravestone is modest for a president, which feels right somehow.

Buchanan regularly appears at or near the bottom of presidential rankings - often in last place, just below Andrew Johnson and Franklin Pierce.

The C-SPAN historians' survey, which polls presidential scholars, has ranked him dead last in several editions.

It is not a distinction anyone in Lancaster tends to brag about.

The case against him is familiar: he failed to act when action might have mattered; he enabled the South while alienating the North; he handed Lincoln a country already in freefall; his passivity in the secession crisis was a kind of dereliction.

The case for him - and yes, there are historians who make it - runs roughly like this: the Civil War was not going to be prevented by one president in four years, no matter how skillfully he governed.

The fault lines had been building for decades.

Any Democrat who won in 1856 would have faced the same impossible terrain. Buchanan believed in the constitutional limits of executive power, and he acted accordingly - which is not always a bad thing in a president.

And the alternatives to Buchanan in 1856 were not obviously better.

None of that fully exonerates him. But it is a more complicated picture than the bumper-sticker version.

What is undisputed: he was enormously capable and experienced. He spent forty years in public life and, by most measures, served with distinction in every role before the presidency.

He was a brilliant lawyer and a skilled diplomat.

He was a good-humored host who kept a warm household at Wheatland and was, by personal accounts, a genuinely kind man in private life.

And then, when the moment came that called for everything he had, he didn't have what it required.

Lancaster County carries this history lightly, which is perhaps the most honest way to carry it.

Wheatland is maintained as a historic site by the LancasterHistory organization. It's open for tours and is a genuinely beautiful property - a peaceful, Federal-style house with wide lawns and tall trees that feels more like a country retreat than a presidential landmark. Walking through it, you get a real sense of the man: his love of entertaining, his comfortable prosperity, his cultivated tastes.

Woodward Hill Cemetery, where he's buried, is worth a quiet hour on a weekend afternoon. Buchanan's grave is a few minutes' walk from the entrance, plainly marked. He rests among a great many other Lancastrians who made their marks in smaller ways.

There is no Buchanan Bridge, no Buchanan Boulevard. There's not much named after him in the city. That's a kind of verdict too.

But he was ours. Lancaster's only president, and the only Pennsylvanian to ever hold the office. He grew up a few miles from where you're reading this. He practiced law and made his home here for most of his adult life. He is buried here.

You don't have to admire him to find him worth knowing. The story of James Buchanan is, among other things, a story about what happens when a very smart, very prepared, very experienced person meets a moment that demands something he doesn't have - moral clarity, decisive courage, or simply the willingness to act when acting is hard.

That's a story worth understanding. Especially here.

JAMES BUCHANAN - QUICK FACTS

Born: April 23, 1791, Cove Gap, Pennsylvania (near Mercersburg)

Died: June 1, 1868, at Wheatland, Lancaster

Presidency: 15th President of the United States (1857–1861)

Party: Democrat

Home: Wheatland, 1120 Marietta Avenue, Lancaster (open for tours)

Buried: Woodward Hill Cemetery, 301 E. Strawberry Street, Lancaster

Distinction: Only Pennsylvanian and only Lancaster County resident ever elected president

Also: The only bachelor president in American history