Wishing you many a merry Christmas, and many a happy New Year, I remain always your friend,
James Buchanan.
One other charge of a similar nature must now be intruded upon the notice of the reader. The following contradiction of it was drawn up by Mr. Buchanan himself for publication, but I do not know whether it was in fact published.
Ex-President Buchanan.
There has recently been published in the New York Tribune a letter dated at Gotha on the 12th August, and purporting to have been written by Bayard Taylor, which contains the following: “In this place is published the Almanach de Gotha, the most aristocratic calendar in the world, containing the only reliable pedigrees and portraits of the crowned heads. Well, last summer the publisher was surprised by the reception of a portrait of Miss Harriet Lane, forwarded by her uncle, with a request that it be engraved for next year’s Almanach, as our Republican rulers had a right to appear in the company of the reigning families.”
We are authorized to say that this statement in regard to Ex-President Buchanan is without the least shadow of foundation. He never forwarded such a portrait to the publisher of the Gotha Almanach; never made such a request, and never had any correspondence of any kind, directly or indirectly, with that gentleman. He was, therefore, surprised when this absurd charge was a few days ago brought to his notice by a friend.
I might multiply these misrepresentations of Mr. Buchanan’s acts, his sentiments and opinions, into a catalogue that would only disgust the reader. The sanctity of his domestic circle at Wheatland, after his retirement from the Presidency, and during the early stages of the civil war, was invaded by pretended accounts of his conversation, which were circulated in the issues of newspapers that were unfriendly to him, and which fed a diseased appetite for scandal that could only have existed in a state of unexampled excitement produced by the varying fortunes of the Federal arms. It was indeed a wild and phrensied credulity that could give currency to such falsehoods as were told of him, falsehoods that had no excuse for their origin, or for the credence which they received. It was a state of things which those who are too young to remember it can scarcely conceive, and which those who lived through it must now look back upon with horror.
How he bore himself through all this flood of detraction and abuse; how he never wavered amid disaster or victory, in his firm determination to uphold with all his influence the just authority of the Federal Government; how he prayed for the restoration of the Union and the preservation of the Constitution; how he opened his purse to relieve the suffering and cheer the hearts of the brave men who were fighting the battles of their country, his private correspondence abundantly proves.
In the seven years which intervened between the end of his Presidency and his death, he had, besides the occupation of preparing the defence of his administration, and of entertaining friends, the occupation of writing letters. He was not one of those statesmen who, after a long life of great activity in the excitements of politics and the business of office, cannot be happy in retirement. He had many resources, and one of the chief of them was his pen. Letter-writing was a sort of necessity of his mind, and it is now well that he indulged it. It is in his familiar letters during these last seven years of his life that his character comes out most vividly and attractively, and in nothing does it appear more winning, or more worthy of admiration than it does in the steadfast evenness of temper with which he bore unmerited and unprovoked calumny, and the serenity with which he looked to the future for vindication.