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LIFE
OF
JAMES BUCHANAN
PREFACE.
Notwithstanding the proverbial tendency of biographersto contract what Macaulay has called “thedisease of admiration,” no one who can lay claim to anystrength of mind need allow the fear of such an imputation toprevent him from doing justice to a public man whose life, forwhatever reason, he has undertaken to write. But that myreaders may judge of the degree of my exposure to this malady,a frank explanation of the circumstances under which I cameto write this work is due both to them and to myself.
In the summer of 1880, the executors and the nearest survivingrelatives of Mr. Buchanan asked me to allow them to placein my hands the whole collection of his private papers, with aview to the preparation of a biographical and historical workconcerning his public and private life. This duty could nothave been undertaken by me, without an explicit understandingthat I was to treat the subject in an entirely independent andimpartial spirit. To be of much value, the work, as I conceived,must necessarily be, to some extent, a history of the times inwhich Mr. Buchanan acted an important part as a public man.Moreover, although I had been for far the greater part of thisperiod an attentive observer of public affairs, I had no specialinterest in Mr. Buchanan’s fame, and was never personallyknown to him. I could have no object, therefore, of any kind,to subserve, save the truth of history; nor did the representativesivof Mr. Buchanan desire me, in assuming the office of hisbiographer, to undertake that of an official eulogist. I havesought for information, aside from the papers of the late President,in many quarters where I knew that I could obtain it; butthe opinions, inferences and conclusions contained in these volumesare exclusively my own, excepting in the few instances inwhich I have expressly quoted those of other persons. No onehas exercised or endeavored to exercise the slightest influenceover what I have said of Mr. Buchanan, and I acknowledge andhave felt no loyalty to his reputation beyond the loyalty thatev