I can only add my often and sincere regret that I should have been concerned, in any way, in doing injustice to Mr. Buchanan, in the trying scenes he had to encounter.

Geo. Plumer Smith.

Philadelphia, February 8, 1882.

The reader should now peruse an extract from a private letter, written by Mr. Buchanan to his niece, Miss Lane, immediately after he had heard that Mr. Stanton had been appointed by President Lincoln Secretary of War. It shows, in addition to the internal evidence which the story of the “cabinet scene” carried within itself for its own refutation, that Mr. Stanton was a very unlikely person to have played the part imputed to him in that account.

[MR. BUCHANAN TO MISS LANE.]

Wheatland, near Lancaster, January 16, 1862.

My Dear Harriet:—

...... Well, our friend Stanton has been appointed Secretary of War. I presume, without knowing, that this has been done by the influence of General McClellan. I have reason to believe they are very intimate. What are Mr. Stanton’s qualifications for that, the greatest and most responsible office in the world, I cannot judge. I appointed him Attorney General when Judge Black was raised to the State Department, because his professional business and that of the Judge, especially in California cases, were so intimately connected that he could proceed in the Supreme Court without delay. He is a sound, clear-headed, persevering and practical lawyer, and is quite eminent, especially in patent cases. He is not well versed in public, commercial or constitutional law, because his professional duties as a country lawyer never led him to make these his study. I believe him to be a perfectly honest man, and in that respect he differs from ——. He never took much part in cabinet councils, because his office did not require it. He was always on my side, and flattered me ad nauseam.[[170]]

In the confidential letters of Mr. Buchanan, hereafter to be quoted, his feelings about this story will be fully disclosed. The story carried within itself a plain implication that he had been grossly insulted by four members of his cabinet, an insult, which if it had ever occurred, would have been instantly followed by their dismissal from office. He was not a man to brook such an indignity, nor was there a man among all those who were falsely said to have offered it, who would have dared to be guilty of it. The contradiction given to it by Judge Black, in his letter to Mr. Schell, was not immediately published.

How Mr. Stanton came to leave this falsehood without contradiction, and what he said about it after he had assumed new political relations, and after he learned the source from which Mr. Weed received it, the reader has seen from the statement of the gentleman who communicated it to Mr. Weed, and who received it from Col. McCook.