From your friend, very respectfully,

James Buchanan.

CHAPTER XXVIII.
1862-1864.

PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE.

The residue of my task can be easily and best performed by tracing in his correspondence the course of Mr. Buchanan’s remaining years. As the letters quoted in the last chapter disclose, his tranquillity was disturbed only by his anxiety for the country, and by the attacks which were made upon his reputation. He lived through the whole of the war, through the first administration of Lincoln, the nomination of McClellan as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency, the second election of Lincoln, his assassination and the accession of President Johnson. The new and critical public questions that arose, the events that marked the wavering fortunes of the country, found him the same in feeling and opinion about the necessity for a complete suppression of all the military array of the Confederate States, and the restoration of the authority of the Federal Constitution. It would have been quite natural, if the mode in which he was treated had caused him to shut himself up in a stolid indifference to the success of the Federal arms. But his nature was too noble, his patriotism was too genuine, to allow the insults and injuries that were heaped upon him to affect his love for that Union in whose service forty years of his life had been passed. It is needless for me to enlarge upon the character of his patriotism; for it is attested by every sentiment and feeling that he was expressing from day to day in his most familiar and unpremeditated correspondence with his friends. But it is an important part of my duty to describe with accuracy the steps that he meditated and that he finally took, for the vindication of the course of his administration during the last five months of his term.

It has already been seen that soon after his retirement to Wheatland, he began to collect and arrange the materials for a defence; and that he was dissuaded from immediate publication by the friends who believed that he could not get the public ear. He withheld the publication of the book until the war was virtually over; and, in fact, he did not cause it to be published until some time after the Presidential election of 1864, for it was no part of his object to promote by it the immediate success of the Democratic party. What he meant to do was to leave behind him an exact and truthful account of his administration “on the eve of the rebellion.” The extent to which it obtained the public attention may be judged by the fact that five thousand copies of it were sold, mostly in the course of two years after its first publication, which was in the year 1866.[[177]] The sale was not as large as might have been expected, partly in consequence of the temper of the times, and partly because it was written in the third person, which made it a little less lively narrative than it might have been. But although his name was not put on the title page, the preface disclosed plainly that he was the author. It was entirely his own work. The style is clear and strong, and its accuracy has not been—indeed, it could not well be—seriously questioned. Its statements were chiefly founded on the public documents of the time to which they related, and the information furnished to him by the gentlemen of his cabinet who could assist his recollection. He did not make a direct use, by quotation, of those ample stores of proof which he held among his private papers, and which he left for the future use of his biographer.

It will be seen from the letters which I am about to quote, that after the publication of this book, he intended to have prepared, under his own direction, a full biography, in justice, he said, to himself and the great men whom he had known and with whom he had acted. He continued through the remainder of his life to collect materials for this purpose. Various arrangements were made from time to time for carrying out this object, but none of them took effect, partly because of his increasing bodily infirmities, and partly because he could not have exactly the assistance that he needed. His intellectual faculties continued, as his correspondence abundantly shows, to be unimpaired to the last; and such was the tenacity of his memory, his vast experience, his fund of amusing as well as[as well as] important anecdotes, and his thorough acquaintance with the politics of the time through which he had lived, that an historical work from his pen, or one written under his immediate direction, would have been of inestimable value. As it was, he collected a very great mass of materials for the elucidation of his own history and of the history of the country from 1820 to 1860. But these materials remained in an undigested state down to the time of his death; and when he executed his last will, he inserted in it a provision for the preparation of a biography, which did not take effect as he had designed, for a reason to which I have referred in the preface of the present work. He had acted history, had lived history, and he was eminently qualified to write history.

[MR. BUCHANAN TO MISS LANE.]

Wheatland, January 3d, 1862.

My Dear Harriet:—