He belonged to a generation of eminent statesmen, giants in their day, whose names were once household words in the land, but who, in him as their representative, we can all feel have passed away forever from the drama of our national life. There is something peculiarly affecting in this thought. He was the last link that held us in communication with that buried age; and in parting with Mr. Buchanan, it is as though we were called to part again with Clay, and Webster, and Benton, and Calhoun, and Jackson, and Cass, and the whole political world to which they belonged. Now, more than ever, their age has become to us, in view especially of the late war, like the years before the flood. Then the occasions with which he has been intimately connected, especially in the latter part of his public life, have been of the most momentous, as well as the most difficult and trying character, involving in the end a crisis which amounted to a full revolution for our own country, while it made itself felt, also, as of truly world-historical importance for the age at large.
This is not the place nor the time, of course, to enter into any consideration of Mr. Buchanan’s public career, or to pronounce any judgment in particular on the policy of his administration as President of the United States. The time, indeed, has not yet come for a fair and competent historical verdict on this subject, in any quarter. We stand too near the vast and mighty struggle through which we have just passed, and from whose surging billows we have not yet fully escaped, to understand it properly, or to estimate fairly its moral and political merits.
Only this much, in justice to the dead, I may be permitted to say, in the form of two general observations:
In the first place, we have no right to judge Mr. Buchanan’s conduct at the beginning of our late civil troubles by the course of events subsequently, when the contingent became actual, and the problematical certain, in many ways, which only the eye of Omniscience could previously foresee. How far this ex post facto judgment (cruel and wrongful in history, full as much as ex post facto statutes in legislation), has been carried in the case before us, all who care to look into the matter can easily see and know. Every man, every public man especially, has a right to demand that his opinions and actions should be measured by the circumstances and conditions of his own time, and not by the circumstances and conditions of another and, it may be, a wholly different time. Any other mode of judgment is at once grossly unhistorical, grossly unphilosophical, and I will also add, grossly unchristian.
My other observation is, that whatever may be thought by others, now or hereafter, of Mr. Buchanan’s Presidential administration on the eve of the rebellion, he himself never changed his mind in regard to the righteousness or wisdom of the course which he saw proper to pursue. That his own policy was thwarted and overwhelmed by another policy, altogether different, never led him to believe that, in the circumstances of the country, as they then were, his own policy was not right. “Had I to pass through the same state of things again,” he would say, calmly but firmly, “I do not see, before God, how I could act otherwise than as I did act.”
This, of course, does not prove that his course was the wisest and best for the exigencies of that fearfully volcanic time, as they came to view afterwards in the lava flames of our civil war; but no one who was intimately familiar, as I have been, with the last years of Mr. Buchanan’s life, could doubt, at all events, the sincerity of his own convictions, thus expressed in regard to the closing portions of his political career.[[188]] Whether absolutely wise or not in all his counsels, he was, in this time that tried men’s souls, honest, at least, conscientious and patriotically true to what he conceived to be the highest interests of his country.
But these political surroundings of the present solemnity, however they must unavoidably crowd upon our thoughts while we are engaged in it, form not, by any means, what we should all feel to be, for us now, its main interest. The relations of time, however otherwise vast and momentous, are here to-day, swallowed up and made small by the relations of eternity. Mr. Buchanan has passed away, not simply as a politician and a statesman, but as a Christian; and this it is we now feel, standing by his coffin and his grave, to be a distinction of infinitely higher account than all the honors and dignities of his life, under any other form.
These, at best, are but of ephemeral significance and worth. One generation of politicians passeth away and another generation cometh. Where are the voices that, thirty or forty years ago, filled our Congressional halls and electrified the land with their eloquent words? Kings and Presidents, the princes of the earth—terrestrial gods, as they are sometimes called—die like other men. “All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass; the grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away, but the word of the Lord endureth forever.” And where do we find this enduring word of the Lord in full presence and power, save in the Logos Incarnate, our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Alpha and Omega of the whole creation, the same yesterday, to-day and forever?
Happily[Happily], the venerable sage of Wheatland, as he has sometimes been called, sought and found here what he himself was ready to acknowledge as something better than all the greatness of the world; an humble but strong trust in the atoning righteousness of Christ, which brightened the whole evening of his life, which proved to be the strength of his spirit, when heart and flesh began to fail, and which now makes his death but the quiet sleep that precedes the morning of the resurrection. He died in the Lord; this is our great comfort in following him to the grave. We sorrow not as those who have no hope. “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.”
In some sense, Mr. Buchanan was a religious man, we may say, all his life. Brought into the Presbyterian church by baptism in his infancy, he enjoyed at the same time the unspeakable advantage of an early Christian training, which made itself felt more or less sensibly on all his character and conduct in later years. In serious conversation with me on this subject less than a year ago, he referred, with moistened eyes and faltering voice, to the lessons that had been instilled into him as a boy, especially by his pious mother. She had taught him to pray; and her presence, as an invisible ministering spirit, seemed to hold him to the duty, as it were in spite of himself, through the whole of his subsequent public life. Whatever of worldliness there might be in his thoughts and ways otherwise, his conscience would not allow him to give up the outward exercise, at least, of some private as well as public, forms of devotion. He made it a point to read the bible, honored the Sabbath, and observed more or less faithfully stated times for secret prayer.