was sent by President Pierce as minister to England this claim was still maintained.
On the accession of the whig party to power
under Taylor, in March, 1849, Mr. Buchanan
retired for a time from official life. His home, from
the age of eighteen, had been the city of Lancaster,
where he owned a house. In the autumn of 1848
he purchased a small estate of twenty-two acres,
known as Wheatland, about a mile from the town.
The house was a substantial brick mansion, and, on
Mr. Buchanan's retirement from the cabinet, this
became his permanent abode when he was not
occupying an official residence in London or in
Washington. Mr. Buchanan never married. The
death of the lady whom he had intended to marry
was a deep and lasting sorrow. The loss of his
sister, Mrs. Lane, in 1839, and of her husband two
years later, gave him the care of their four children;
and the youngest of these, afterward widely
known as Miss Harriet Lane, became an inmate of
his household. James Buchanan Henry, the son
of another sister, who died about the same time,
was also taken into his family; and these two cousins
were brought up by their uncle with the most
wise and affectionate care. Mr. Buchanan's letters
to his niece, begun when she was a school-girl, and,
after Miss Lane had grown up, written almost
daily during her absences from him, give a charming
picture of his private life. During the few
years of Mr. Buchanan's unofficial life, passed chiefly
at Wheatland, he does not appear to have devoted
much time to the law. His correspondence was
large; and this, with a constant and lively interest
in public affairs, rendered him, even in retirement,
very busy. He lent considerable influence to his
party as a private individual; but his exertions
were not marked by purely partisan feeling. He
strenuously opposed the Wilmot proviso, which
aimed at excluding slavery from all newly acquired
territory; and favored Mr. Clay's “Compromise
Measures of 1850,” which provided for the admission
of California as a free state, and the abolition
of the slave-trade in the District of Columbia; but,
by the fugitive slave law, secured the return to their
owners of slaves that had escaped into free states.
He wrote many influential public letters, in one of
which he declared that “two things are necessary to
preserve the union from danger: 1. Agitation in
the north on the subject of southern slavery must
be rebuked and put down by a strong and enlightened
public opinion; 2. The fugitive slave law must
be enforced in its spirit.” In the presidential election
of 1852 Mr. Buchanan was a candidate for the
democratic nomination; but Gen. Franklin Pierce
received the nomination and was elected. The most
important service rendered by Mr. Buchanan to his
party in this election — and with him a service to his
party was alike a service to his country — was a
speech made at Greensburgh, Pa., in October, 1852,
in opposition to the election of Gen. Scott, the whig
candidate. This speech exhibited in a very clear
light the whole political history of that period, and
asserted a principle which he said ought to be an
article of democratic faith: “Beware of elevating
to the highest civil trust the commander of your
victorious armies,” drawing a distinction between
one “who had been a man of war, and nothing but
a man of war from his youth upward,” and such as
had been “soldiers only in the day and hour of
danger, when the country had demanded their
services, and who had already illustrated high civil
appointments”; and then criticising exhaustively
each of Gen. Scott's avowed political opinions, and
quoting Mr. Thurlow Weed, “one of Gen. Scott's
most able supporters,” as acknowledging that
“there was weakness in all Scott said or did about
the presidency.” When in 1853 Franklin Pierce,
became president, he appointed Mr. Buchanan
minister to England. Buchanan, though social
in his nature, was a man of simple republican
tastes, and the formality and etiquette of life
at a foreign court, never agreeable, now, at the
age of sixty-two, appeared to him particularly
distasteful; besides, he considered that his duty to
his young relatives as well as to his only surviving
brother, a clergyman in delicate health, required
his presence at home. But with Mr. Buchanan
duty to his country always outweighed every other
consideration, and Mr. Pierce's urgent appeal to
him to accept what was at that time a very important
mission, at length prevailed. Mr. Buchanan
sailed for England from New York on 5 Aug., 1853,
and landed in Liverpool on the 17th. There were
three important questions to be settled with England
at this time: the first related to the fisheries;
the second was the desire of England to establish
reciprocal free trade in certain enumerated articles
between the United States and the British North
American provinces, and thus preserve their
allegiance and ward off the danger of their annexation
to the United States; and this Mr. Buchanan was
very desirous to use as a powerful lever to secure
the third point, which the United States earnestly
desired, viz., the withdrawal of all British dominion
in Central America, and the recognition of the Monroe
doctrine, which the Clayton-Bulwer treaty had
not firmly established. President Pierce considered
it best that the reciprocity and fishery questions
should be settled at Washington; but Mr. Buchanan
was intrusted with the negotiation of the Central
American question in London. Mr. Buchanan's
main object was to develop and ascertain the precise
differences between the two governments in regard
to the construction of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty,
but the Crimean war so long delayed the negotiations
with this country that nothing could be
accomplished while he remained in England. As the
war approached, and when it was finally declared,
the principles of neutrality, privateering, and many
other topics came within the range of the discussion;
and it was very much in consequence of the
views expressed by Mr. Buchanan to Lord Clarendon,
and by the latter communicated to the British
cabinet, that the course of England toward
neutrals during that war became what it was.
When Lord Clarendon, in 1854, presented to Mr.
Buchanan a projet for a treaty between Great Britain,
France, and the United States, making it piracy
for neutrals to serve on board of privateers cruising
against the commerce of either of the three
nations when such nation was a belligerent, the
very impressive reasons that Mr. Buchanan opposed
to it caused it to be abandoned. An American
