You are pleased to refer in favorable terms to my recent conduct “at home in defence of the Federal Constitution and laws.” This was an easy and agreeable task, because the people of Pennsylvania have ever been as loyal and faithful to the Constitution, the Union, the rights of the sovereign States of which it is composed, as the people of the ancient Dominion themselves. To have pursued a different course in my native State would therefore, have been to resist the strong current of enlightened public opinion.
I purposely refrain from discussing the original merit of the Compromise, because I consider it, to employ the expressive language of the day, as a “finality”—a fixed fact—a most important enactment of law, the agitation or disturbance of which could do no possible good, but might produce much positive evil. Our noble vessel of State, freighted with the hope of mankind, both for the present and future generations, has passed through the most dangerous breakers which she has ever encountered, and has triumphantly ridden out the storm. Both those who supported the measures of the Compromise as just and necessary, and those who, regarding them in a different light, yet acquiesce in them for the sake of the Union, have arrived at the same conclusion—that it must and shall be executed. They have thus, for every practical purpose, adopted the same platform, and have resolved to sustain it against the common enemy.—Why, then, should they wrangle, and divide and waste their energies, not respecting the main question, which has already been definitely settled, but in regard to the process which has brought them, though from different directions, to the same conclusion? Above all, why should the strength of the Democratic party of the country be impaired and its ascendency be jeoparded for any such cause? We who believe that the triumph of Democratic principles is essential not only to the prosperity of the Union, but even to the preservation of the Constitution, ought reciprocally to forget, and, if need be, to forgive the past, and cordially unite with our political brethren in sustaining for the future the good old cause of Democracy. It must be a source of deep and lasting pleasure to every patriotic heart that our beloved country has so happily passed through the late trying and dangerous crisis. The volcano has been extinguished, I trust, forever; and the man who would apply a firebrand, at the present moment, to the combustible materials which still remain, may produce an eruption to overwhelm both the Constitution and the Union.
With sentiments of high and grateful respect,
I remain your fellow citizen,
James Buchanan.
[TO JOHN NELSON, WM. F. GILES, JOHN O. WHARTON, JOHN MORRIS, CARROLL SPENCE, AND OTHER CITIZENS OF BALTIMORE.]
Wheatland, near Lancaster, February 3, 1852.
Gentlemen:—
In returning home through your city on Saturday last, I had the unexpected honor of receiving your kind invitation to partake of a public dinner at such time as might best suit my own convenience. For this distinguished and valuable token of your regard, please to accept my most grateful acknowledgments; and, whilst regretting that circumstances, which it would be too tedious to explain, will deprive me of the pleasure of meeting you at the festive board, you may rest assured that I shall ever highly prize the favorable opinion you express of my poor public services.
To the city of Baltimore I have ever been attached by strong ties. In early life I had selected it as the place where to practice my profession; and nothing prevented me from carrying this purpose into effect but my invincible reluctance, at the last moment, to leave my native State. The feeling which prompted me in 1814, during the last war with Great Britain, to march as a private to Baltimore, a circumstance to which you kindly allude, resulted from a patriotism so universal throughout Pennsylvania, that the honor which may fall to the lot of any one of the thousands of my fellow-citizens who volunteered their services on that trying occasion, scarcely deserves to be mentioned.