James Buchanan

James Buchanan, born April 23, 1791, in Cove Gap, Pennsylvania, and died June 1, 1868, served as the fifteenth President of the United States from 1857 to 1861, and remains the only person to hold the office who never married. His single term was dominated by the country's escalating crisis over slavery; he held that individual states had no constitutional right to secede from the Union but also believed the federal government lacked clear authority to stop them, and by the end of his term, in the weeks after Abraham Lincoln's election, seven Southern states had declared their secession. He left office in March 1861 just before the outbreak of the Civil War.