The parents of Mr. Buchanan were both of Scotch-Irish descent, and Presbyterians. At what time this branch of the Buchanan family emigrated from Scotland to Ireland is not known; but John Buchanan, the grandfather of the President, who was a farmer in the county of Donegal in Ireland, married Jane Russel, about the middle of the last century. She was a daughter of Samuel Russel, who was also a farmer of Scotch-Presbyterian descent in the same county. James Buchanan, their son, and father of the President, was brought up by his mother’s relatives. Elizabeth Speer, the President’s mother, was the only daughter of James Speer, who was also of Scotch-Presbyterian ancestry, and who emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1756. James Speer and his wife (Mary Patterson) settled at first on a farm ten miles from Lancaster, and afterwards at the foot of the South Mountain between Chambersburg and Gettysburg. It is told in some memoranda which now lie before me, that in 1779, James Speer left the “Covenanted Church,” on account of difficulties with Mr. Dobbins, his pastor, and was afterwards admitted to full communion in the Presbyterian congregation under the care of the Rev. John Black. This incident sufficiently indicates the kind of religious atmosphere in which Mrs. Buchanan grew up; and the letters of both parents to their son, from which I shall have occasion to quote frequently, afford abundant evidence of that deep and peculiar piety which characterized the sincere Christians of their denomination. They were married on the 16th of April, 1788, when Mrs. Buchanan was just twenty-one, and her husband twenty-seven. Eleven children were born to them between 1789 and 1811. James, the future President, was born April 23d, 1791. Of his early education and his college life, he gives this account: “After having received a tolerably good English education, I studied the Latin and Greek languages at a school in Mercersburg. It was first kept by the Rev. James R. Sharon, then a student of divinity with Dr. John King, and afterwards by a Mr. McConnell and Dr. Jesse Magaw, then a student of medicine, and subsequently my brother-in-law. I was sent to Dickinson College in the fall of 1807, where I entered the junior class. “The college was in a wretched condition; and I have often regretted that I had not been sent to some other institution. There was no efficient discipline, and the young men did pretty much as they pleased. To be a sober, plodding, industrious youth was to incur the ridicule of the mass of the students. Without much natural tendency to become dissipated, and chiefly from the example of others, and in order to be considered a clever and a spirited youth, I engaged in every sort of extravagance and mischief in which the greatest proficients of the college indulged. Unlike the rest of this class, however, I was always a tolerably hard student, and never was deficient in my college exercises.