Notwithstanding the proverbial tendency of biographers to contract what Macaulay has called “the disease of admiration,” no one who can lay claim to any strength of mind need allow the fear of such an imputation to prevent him from doing justice to a public man whose life, for whatever reason, he has undertaken to write. But that my readers may judge of the degree of my exposure to this malady, a frank explanation of the circumstances under which I came to write this work is due both to them and to myself. In the summer of 1880, the executors and the nearest surviving relatives of Mr. Buchanan asked me to allow them to place in my hands the whole collection of his private papers, with a view to the preparation of a biographical and historical work concerning his public and private life. This duty could not have been undertaken by me, without an explicit understanding that I was to treat the subject in an entirely independent and impartial spirit. To be of much value, the work, as I conceived, must necessarily be, to some extent, a history of the times in which Mr. Buchanan acted an important part as a public man. Moreover, although I had been for far the greater part of this period an attentive observer of public affairs, I had no special interest in Mr. Buchanan’s fame, and was never personally known to him. I could have no object, therefore, of any kind, to subserve, save the truth of history; nor did the representatives I have thought it proper to say this much concerning my relations to the family of Mr. Buchanan, for two reasons. The President, by his will, appointed as his biographer a personal friend, the late Mr. William B. Reed of Philadelphia, in whom he had great confidence, and who was a very accomplished writer. But Mr. Reed was prevented by private misfortunes from doing anything more than to examine Mr. Buchanan’s voluminous papers, and to prepare two introductory chapters of the intended Life. Of these I could make no use, as they did not accord with my method of treating the subject. After Mr. Reed had surrendered the task which he had undertaken, the papers were placed in the hands of the late Judge John Cadwallader of Philadelphia, another personal friend of the President. This gentleman died before he had begun to write the proposed work; and when the papers, which had been placed in his hands by the executors, came into mine, along with another large collection from Wheatland, I had to subject them to an entirely new arrangement and classification, before anything could be done. In resorting to a stranger as the biographer of Mr. Buchanan, his executors and friends did what circumstances had rendered unavoidable. The only assurance I can give is that I have had no reason to be otherwise than strictly faithful The other reason for a candid explanation of my relation to this subject will occur to every one. Mr. Buchanan’s administration of the Government during the four years which preceded the commencement of our civil war, is a topic upon which friends and foes have widely differed. But no unprejudiced person who now examines the facts can doubt that, in many minds, injustice has been done to him. Perhaps this was inevitable, considering that a sectional civil war, of vast magnitude and attended with great bitterness, followed immediately after his retirement from office, when a political party which had been in opposition to his administration came for the first time into the full control of the Federal Government. It was in the nature of things—or rather, I should say, it was in the nature of man—that those who succeeded to the Government should have charged upon the outgoing administration that they had been remiss in their public duty; and that under the example of men in high places, there should have grown up a popular belief that Mr. Buchanan favored the secession of the Southern States, either purposely, or by lack of the proper energy to meet it in its incipient stages. Charges of this kind found popular credence in a time of unexampled excitement; and since the war was ended, there have been, and doubtless there still are, many persons who regard President Buchanan as a man who could have saved the country from a frightful civil war, if he had had the wish and the energy to nip Secession in the bud. Such, at all events, were the reproaches with which many of his countrymen pursued him into retirement, and continued to follow him to his grave. Denied as he was a hearing while he lived, because the perils and turmoils of the immediate present unfitted men to look dispassionately back into the past, he may well have desired that in some calmer time, when he had gone In regard to this and to every other part of his life, I have found it an interesting task to trace the history of a man whose public and private character were always pure, whose patriotism was co-extensive with his whole country, whose aims were high, and who was habitually conscientious in the discharge of every obligation. My estimate of his abilities and power as a statesman has risen with every investigation that I have made; and it is, in my judgment, not too much to say of him as a President of the United States, that he is entitled to stand very high on the catalogue—not a large one—of those who have had the moral courage to encounter misrepresentation and obloquy, rather than swerve from the line of duty which their convictions marked out for them. I must say a few words in explanation of my method of describing important public transactions, the interest in which attaches both to the events and to an individual who has borne a chief part in them. There are two modes of historical writing. One is to make a narrative of the course of a foreign negotiation, for example, or of any other public action, without quoting despatches or documents. The other, which scarcely rises above the dignity of compilation, is to let the story be told mainly by the documents. But in biography, where the interest centres for the nonce in some principal actor, I conceive that the better course is to unite the two methods, by so much of description as is needful to illustrate the documents, and by so much of quotation as is needful to give force to the It is perhaps almost superfluous for me to say that it would have been impracticable for me within the limits of these two volumes to give an account of every debate in Congress in which Mr. Buchanan took part, or of every transaction with which he was connected as a foreign minister, as Secretary of State, or as President. Such of his speeches as I have quoted at length have been selected because of the interest that still attaches to the subject, or some part of it, or because they illustrate his powers as a debater; and in making selections or quotations from his diplomatic papers, I have been unavoidably confined to those which related to critical questions in our foreign relations. It was equally impracticable for me to touch upon the connections which he had with numerous political persons in the course of a public life of forty years. I have drawn a It remains for me to give a description of the materials of which I have made use, and to make the customary acknowledgments to those who supplied them. Any man who has been in public life for a long period of time, and has attained to the highest public stations, must necessarily have accumulated a vast amount of materials of the highest importance to the elucidation of his own history and of the history of the times in which he has acted. Mr. Buchanan had a habit of preserving nearly everything that came into his hands. The mass of his private correspondence is enormous. I can hardly specify the number of letters that I have had to read, in order to form an adequate idea of the state of the public mind in the opposite sections of the Union during the period when he first had to encounter the secession movement. My recollection of the condition of public opinion at such junctures was pretty vivid, but I could not venture to trust to it without examining the best evidence; for undoubtedly the best evidence of public opinion was to be found in the private letters which at such periods reached the President from all quarters of the country. Many hundreds of such letters have been examined, in order to write, and to write correctly, a very few pages. Mr. Buchanan had also another habit of great utility. Although he did not always keep a regular diary or journal, he rarely held an important conversation, or was engaged in a critical transaction, without writing down an account of it with his own hand The principal mass of these papers, along with the public documents which were connected with them, was collected by Mr. Buchanan himself, in the interval between his retirement from the Presidency and his death. This collection was placed in my hands by his brother and executor, the Rev. Edward Y. Buchanan, D.D., of Philadelphia. Another large collection came to me from Mr. and Mrs. Henry E. Johnston, the present possessors of Wheatland. Mrs. Johnston enriched the collection of papers which were sent to me from Wheatland, by adding to them a great quantity of her uncle’s letters to herself, of which she kindly permitted me to take copies. From James Buchanan Henry, Esq., nephew of the President, and for some time his private secretary, and from Miss Buchanan, daughter of the Rev. Dr. Buchanan, I have received interesting contributions, which have found their place in my work. Next to these, the immediate relatives of President Buchanan, I am indebted to the Hon. Jeremiah S. Black, Attorney-General and afterwards Secretary of State during Mr. Buchanan’s Presidency, for important information. I am under like obligations to Brinton Coxe and Joseph B. Baker, Esqs., of Philadelphia, friends of the late President. And finally, from my own valued friend of many years, Samuel L. M. Barlow, Esq., of New York, I have received two very interesting contributions, which are quoted and credited New York, May 1, 1883. |