I can speak regarding Buchanan, as I had the opportunity to read documents belonging to his White House secretary.

Buchanan was a Constitutional scholar, and well versed in law. The law (as he read it) did not give him the authority to send the Army into South Carolina (and later other rebellious states) to prevent secession by force of arms. It was up to Congress to come to a compromise to defuse the situation, something that was impossible with Representative and Senators from the North and South vilifying each other.

He officially notified Congress that if they wanted him to intervene in the Southern states militarily, they would have to pass a law granting him that power. This was something that was impossible for Congress to do in its current state.

Perhaps the largest factor in Buchanan not responding with military force to the seizure of Federal property (including forts and arsenals) by the South was the fact that he was a lame duck President.

South Carolina was the first to secede, but did not do so until Lincoln won the election. What would have been the hue and cry had Buchanan invaded the South and ignited a civil war right before Lincoln took over? Remember, there was still hope among many that the situation could be solved without bloodshed.

So yes, Buchanan was roundly vilified in 1860 and beyond for not using the Army to occupy the seceding states, but he took what he believed was the best of nothing but bad choices that were afforded him by law.

This is very hard to give any answer to. The nineteenth century doesn't have polling and approval ratings like we do to get a sense of popular opinion. We can't read single term presidencies as signs of unpopularity because they're the norm between Jackson and Lincoln. Difficult relationships with Congress don't necessarily tell us a lot either because they can be the results of party infighting. The closest they could come was to look at midterm elections, often on the state level, and extrapolate from that. If the president's party was doing well in them, then that was a sign that things were ok. If not, they were in trouble. Either way, it's hard to extrapolate from them that people thought someone was Worst Ever rather than just lost support he once had.

I don't have all the data on hand to give you a comprehensive study of the four presidencies, but I can do one. Since Fillmore is paradoxically famous for not being famous, Taylor dies in office, and everybody knows what Buchanan bungled, that leaves Pierce as the best candidate. Also he may be the one I've studied the most. :)

Pierce is elected in 1852, when the nation's still a big hung over from the Compromise of 1850. It's immensely controversial and not much of a compromise at all, just like the previous sectional pacts. Almost everyone hates a part of it passionately, to the point where a couple years down the road Sam Houston boasts in the Senate that he's one of four or five senators who voted for every measure in it. Even Stephen Douglas, who floor managed the bills and assembled their creaky coalitions, couldn't say that. The resistance to the compromise measures in the South pushes close to secession, to the point where there's an active conspiracy by a couple of governors to that end. Even the Unionist, pro-Compromise response in the South is that remaining in the nation is contingent on the North's absolute submission to the measures. In the North you have large popular protests and violent resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act.

The watchword of the moderate political class, however, is finality. They've done it all and arranged a permanent settlement of all sectional issues. Now the job is to clamp down and not ever touch slavery again. Pierce is elected on that platform, as the Pleasant Mr. Pierce and Young Hickory of the Granite Hills. (He's a Democrat from New Hampshire.) He's generally thought of as a good looking, easygoing guy and was the compromise candidate at the Democratic convention that year. He ran against the Whigs' latest general, Winfield Scott, and John P. Hale of the Free Soil party. Incidentally, Hale and Pierce knew each other from way back. Both were New Hampshire Democrats until Pierce read Hale out of the party for being too antislavery.

Pierce clobbers Scott, 254-42 in the electoral college and taking 27 of the 31 states. Nobody had a margin of victory like that since before modern parties existed...but the big numbers mask some serious issues. The Democracy failed to win the northern popular vote. It was previously the norm that presidents won the popular vote of both sections. Still, he got to go live in the White House for four years.

They were a mess. Pierce intrigued with filibusters to steal Cuba from Spain, then had to pull back when the Spanish reinforced the island. He tilted with Britain over Central America. He might not have been in control of his own administration. And then there's Kansas. Franklin Pierce is the president who signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, opening almost all of the nation's territories which had been reserved to freedom since 1820 and the Missouri Compromise, to slavery. Officially the locals would vote slavery in or out, but he put his name to a law that undid a clear prohibition on slavery in favor of admitting it.

That came at the end of a tremendous fight in Congress that stretched out for months. It's a Democratic party measure pressed by the Dems, passed by their majorities, and signed by their president. It also addresses the most crucial issue in the antebellum era. So it's a great place to look at how things went over in the general public.

The midterms were brutal. Forty-four northern Dems voted for the Nebraska bill. Seven of them retained their seats. Of those who voted against or abstained, forty-eight in all, fifteen got to come back to Washington for another term. That's a profound repudiation of the governing party...in the North. In the South, the Dems only lost four seats. Up North, it was sixty-six. The Democracy had always leaned South, often heavily, but been viable in the North. This basically puts them on a death spiral that they don't really recover from until after the Civil War. Since there's so little counterweight to southern influence, the remaining northern Dems have to tilt further South. That in turn makes them less appealing to northern voters. Rinse and repeat. In the Congress elected in 1854, they lose control of the House to an opposition coalition.

The Democrats elect one more president, barely. James Buchanan brings them back to control of the House again for a while, but we know how that worked out. Pierce thus holds the rare distinction of being a president who did nearly fatal damage to his own party. His signature on the Kansas-Nebraska Act also caused the final rupture of the Whigs between antislavery and proslavery wings, the former of which ended up reorganized with Democratic defectors into a new anti-Nebraska party to restore the Missouri Compromise and ban slavery from all the territories. By the end of the year, they're calling themselves Republicans.

Sources

I took my numbers from Potter's classic The Impending Crisis, which has a decent overview of the other things going on during Pierce's presidency too. It was a busy four years. However, Potter is badly out of date on what happened in Kansas as a result of all this. The modern survey there is Etcheson's Bleeding Kansas.

Add on question:

Would the people of this time blame the President or the congress more?

I know at this point congress and the states still held more power than the POTUS. And I guess in turn I would also be interested in knowing what the opinions of congress were at this time, if that's even documented.

Something further: before Andrew Jackson and his followers' expansion of suffrage, did the common man on the street who was not allowed to vote pay a lot of attention to the Presidency and federal politics in general?

Kind readers,

literally none of the comments posted so far have even attempted to address the question. That's why all comments have been removed.

/r/AskHistorians aims to provide serious, academic-level answers to questions about history. Anything which is not an in-depth and comprehensive answer to the question will be removed.

We kindly ask that you save both yourself and us some time by not making low effort posts in this thread. While this is a kind request, it is backed up by our one-click 'remove' button and our two-click 'nuke all' button. Moreover, egregious or repeated violations of our kind requests will be met with the 'ban' button.

If you have any question about our rules or moderation policies, please first read our rules. If you still have any questions after that, you can create a META thread or send us a mod mail. Discussion of rules and policies is off-topic in this thread and will be removed.