Yours is a grand mission; and I most devoutly trust and believe that you will fulfil it with glory to yourself and permanent advantage to the country. Democrats have been dropping off from their party from year to year on questions not essentially of a party character. It will be your destiny to call home the wanderers and marshal them again under the ample folds of the Democratic flag. It is thus that the dangerous Whig party will be forever prostrated, and we shall commence a new career of glory, guided under the old banner of our principles.
From the violence of the Southern papers and some of the Southern statesmen, I apprehend that your chief difficulty will be on the question of the tariff. They seem to cling with great tenacity to the horizontal ad valorem duty of the compromise act, which would in practice prostrate the Democracy of the Middle and Northern States in a single year, because it would destroy all our mechanics who work up foreign materials. If the duty on cloth and ready-made clothing were both 20 per cent. ad valorem, we should soon have no use for tailors in our large towns and cities. So of shoemakers, hatters, etc. Foreigners would perform the mechanical labor.
The tariff ought to have been permanently settled in 1842. That was the propitious moment. With much difficulty I have prevented myself from being instructed that I might be free to act according to my own discretion. I then proposed to our Southern friends to adopt the compromise act as it stood in 1839. The Treasury required fully that amount of duties; whilst such a measure would have saved their constituency. For some time I thought they would have gladly embraced this proposition which was presented by Mr. Ingersoll in the House; but at a great caucus of the party several of the ultras opposed the measure, and the consequence has been the extravagant tariff of 1842. Had my proposition been adopted the country would have been just as prosperous as it is at present, and this would have been attributed in the North to that measure, as it now is to the tariff of 1842; you would then have received a majority of 25,000 in Pennsylvania.
With sentiments of the highest respect, I remain
Sincerely your friend,
James Buchanan.
[TO GOVERNOR SHUNK.]
Washington, December 18, 1844.
My Dear Sir:—
I do most heartily rejoice that those who communicated to me expressions used by our friend Magraw must have been mistaken in the inferences which they deduced from his language. He was much in the company of my deadly enemy —— who is ——’s most unscrupulous tool, and of ——. That he did use some unguarded language is beyond a doubt; but all this shall be as if it never had been. I venerated his deceased father, and have always been so much attached to him, that it almost unmanned me, when I learned that he had spoken unkindly of myself. Please to say nothing to him of what my former letter contained.