Best president between Taylor and Lincoln

[TDAS04]

Pick your poison.

[Kingpoleon]

Fillmore(xenophobes>Kansas-Nebraska Act supporters)

1. Fillmore
2. Pierce
3. Buchanan

[Mr. Smith]

At least Pierce was good looking.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Pierce was a New Englander and may have had the excuse of mental illness.

[SWE]

Fillmore for founding the college I'll be attending

[Middle-aged Europe]

Pick your poison.

White Russian.

[OSR stands with Israel]

Fillmore(xenophobes>Kansas-Nebraska Act supporters)

1. Fillmore
2. Pierce
3. Buchanan

[MAINEiac4434]

Pierce for the Bowdoin connection.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Fillmore(xenophobes>Kansas-Nebraska Act supporters)

1. Fillmore
2. Pierce
3. Buchanan

Fillmore wasn't much of a xenophobe. He hitched his wagon to the Know Nothings in order to provide a platform for his Whig pro-Union moderate heroism.

[Wikipedia delenda est]

Fillmore, because the Compromise of 1850 wasn't as bad as the Kansas-Nebraska Act and he wasn't as incompetent as Buchanan. Also, he was a Whig while Pierce and Buchanan were Democrats.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

3 people voted for Buchanan? Are they Confederate sympathisers?

[The Mikado]

Pierce was mentally incompetent for office. Fillmore and Buchanan were just bad at politics.

Pierce wins on the grounds that being mentally ill is at least a reasonable excuse for being a terrible president.

[RINO Tom]

Wow, ugh.  I guess Pierce for feeling really, really bad for him on a personal level?

[SATW]

this is like choosing between three rotten balls of lettuce.

i guess i choose fillmore.

[Chunk Yogurt for President!]

I guess Pierce helped Japan begin its path towards modernization.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Good God, these are terrible. I voted for Fillmore as the only veritable Unionist, and because the Compromise of 1850 is slightly less terrible than turning Kansas into a killing field and forcing through the Dred Scott decision. Needless to say, all three deserve to be pilloried for their appeasement (Fillmore) and/or calculated empowerment (Pierce, Buchanan) of the slave power.

[vanguard96]

Wow, ugh.  I guess Pierce for feeling really, really bad for him on a personal level?

His son died at age 11 in a gory stagecoach accident that both he and his wife witnessed. That definitely had an impact. Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor.

[RINO Tom]

Wow, ugh.  I guess Pierce for feeling really, really bad for him on a personal level?

His son died at age 11 in a gory stagecoach accident that both he and his wife witnessed. That definitely had an impact. Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor.

I've always been an Andrew Johnson hater (and still am, largely), but as I've gotten older, it has become very clear that Buchanan is my least favorite President of all time.  I'll also say that almost all of the "bad Presidents" are probably a little better than we all might think, but Buchanan actively encouraged civil war.

[Orser67]

Ouch. Aside from the simple fact of presiding over the decade before the Civil War, two of these three presidents saw their own party self-destruct, while the other (Pierce) was the first elected president to be denied re-nomination.

I guess Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan in that order, though I suspect that Pierce was actually the most incompetent (but not the most harmful).

[vanguard96]

Wow, ugh.  I guess Pierce for feeling really, really bad for him on a personal level?

His son died at age 11 in a gory stagecoach accident that both he and his wife witnessed. That definitely had an impact. Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor.

I've always been an Andrew Johnson hater (and still am, largely), but as I've gotten older, it has become very clear that Buchanan is my least favorite President of all time.  I'll also say that almost all of the "bad Presidents" are probably a little better than we all might think, but Buchanan actively encouraged civil war.

I really have to study more about the 19th century presidents after Jackson and before Cleveland aside from the Civil War & Lincoln I've not done a lot of reading on the era for me to really rank them in this way.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Wow, ugh.  I guess Pierce for feeling really, really bad for him on a personal level?

His son died at age 11 in a gory stagecoach accident that both he and his wife witnessed. That definitely had an impact. Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor.

I've always been an Andrew Johnson hater (and still am, largely), but as I've gotten older, it has become very clear that Buchanan is my least favorite President of all time.  I'll also say that almost all of the "bad Presidents" are probably a little better than we all might think, but Buchanan actively encouraged civil war.

I really have to study more about the 19th century presidents after Jackson and before Cleveland aside from the Civil War & Lincoln I've not done a lot of reading on the era for me to really rank them in this way.

This is a while back, but I did a high school paper where I ironically tried to defend Buchanan; this turned out to be harder than I thought, though my available selection of historians no doubt added somewhat to this difficulty. In the months prior to his inauguration, Buchanan wrote each Supreme Court justice regarding what he hoped the verdict of Dred Scott would be, hoping that a pro-slavery judicial ruling would settle the issue once and for all. In the last months of his administration, members of his cabinet sold off federal and military equipment to the forming Confederacy; meanwhile, Buchanan stated that he didn't support the secession, but that there was little he could do about it. I can't remember much else for the moment, other than that he earned the nickname "Ten Cent Jimmy" for his lack of response to the Panic of 1857.

[RINO Tom]

Wow, ugh.  I guess Pierce for feeling really, really bad for him on a personal level?

His son died at age 11 in a gory stagecoach accident that both he and his wife witnessed. That definitely had an impact. Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor.

I've always been an Andrew Johnson hater (and still am, largely), but as I've gotten older, it has become very clear that Buchanan is my least favorite President of all time.  I'll also say that almost all of the "bad Presidents" are probably a little better than we all might think, but Buchanan actively encouraged civil war.

I really have to study more about the 19th century presidents after Jackson and before Cleveland aside from the Civil War & Lincoln I've not done a lot of reading on the era for me to really rank them in this way.

This is a while back, but I did a high school paper where I ironically tried to defend Buchanan; this turned out to be harder than I thought, though my available selection of historians no doubt added somewhat to this difficulty. In the months prior to his inauguration, Buchanan wrote each Supreme Court justice regarding what he hoped the verdict of Dred Scott would be, hoping that a pro-slavery judicial ruling would settle the issue once and for all. In the last months of his administration, members of his cabinet sold off federal and military equipment to the forming Confederacy; meanwhile, Buchanan stated that he didn't support the secession, but that there was little he could do about it. I can't remember much else for the moment, other than that he earned the nickname "Ten Cent Jimmy" for his lack of response to the Panic of 1857.

I gained a LITTLE bit of sympathy for him when I read his conversation to the incoming President Lincoln ... will post a direct quote later when I can.  Anyway, it did kind of make you feel sorry for the situation he inherited, but that doesn't excuse his actions during it.