Please to present my best respects to Mrs. Jackson, and believe me to be, very respectfully, your friend, JAMES BUCHANAN. This subject of Mr. Buchanan’s connection with the Presidential election of 1824–5, and its incidents, passed out of the public mind, after the publication of the letters which I have quoted. But it was again revived when Mr. Buchanan became a candidate for the Presidency in 1856. All that it is needful to say here is, that for nearly three years after the election of 1824–5, no impression seems to have existed in the mind of General Jackson that Mr. Buchanan’s interview with him in December, 1824, had any purpose but that which Mr. Buchanan has described; but that in 1827, General Jackson, in the heat of the renewed controversies about the supposed bargain between Mr. Adams and Mr. Clay, took up the erroneous idea that Mr. Buchanan could, if he were to declare the truth, make it apparent that Mr. Clay or his friends had attempted to effect the same kind of bargain with General Jackson, which attempt was indignantly repelled. A candid examination of the facts is all that is needful to convince any one that the General was in error in 1827, and that he was equally in error at a much later period. When he became President, and for a long time thereafter, his confidence in Mr. Buchanan was manifested in so many ways that one is led to believe that his view in 1827 of Mr. Buchanan’s conduct in the matter of the Presidential election of 1824–5 was an exceptional idiosyncrasy, resulting from the excitement which his mind always felt in regard to that event, and which was strongly renewed in him in 1827. It will be necessary to advert to this subject again, because, when Mr. Buchanan was a candidate for the Presidency in 1856, the whole story was revived by persons who were unfriendly to him, and who then made use of a private letter which was extracted from General Jackson in 1845, in a somewhat artful manner, when he was laboring under a mortal illness. But an account of this political intrigue belongs to the period when it was set on foot. ----- Footnote 14: The phrase “Presidential Election” is an awkward and incorrect one. But it has been sanctioned by long usage, and I adopt it because of its convenience. Footnote 15: Mr. Crawford was regarded as out of the question, both because he had less than one-half of the electoral votes, and because a recent paralytic affection was supposed to have rendered him incapable of performing the duties of the office. Footnote 16: The person here alluded to was the Hon. Molton C. Rogers, Chairman of the State Central Committee at Harrisburg, and Secretary of the State of Pennsylvania. He was afterwards a Judge of the Supreme Court of that State. ----- CHAPTER IV. 1825–1826.