Life of James Buchanan, Fifteenth President of the United States. v. 2 (of 2)Curtis, George Ticknor
History
Life of James Buchanan, Fifteenth President of the United States. v. 2 (of 2)
Curtis, George Ticknor
Buchanan, James, 1791-1868
The result of the election shows, with great distinctness, the
following facts: 1st. That Mr. Buchanan was chosen President,
because he received the electoral votes of the five free States of
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, Illinois and California (62 in
all), and that without them he could not have been elected. 2d. That
his Southern vote (that of every slave-holding State excepting
Maryland) was partly given to him because of his conservative
opinions and position, and partly because the candidate for the
Vice-Presidency, Mr. Breckinridge, was a Southern man. 3d. That
General Fremont received the electoral vote of no Southern State,
and that this was due partly to the character of the Republican
party and its Northern tone, and partly to the fact that the
Republican candidate for the Vice Presidency (Mr. Dayton, of New
Jersey), was a citizen of a non-slaveholding State. General Fremont
himself was nominally a citizen of California. This election,
therefore, foreshadowed the sectional division which would be almost
certain to happen in the next one, if the four years of Mr.
Buchanan’s administration should not witness a subsidence in the
sectional feelings between the North and the South. It would only be
necessary for the Republicans to wrest from the Democratic party the
five free States which had voted for Mr. Buchanan, and they would
elect the President in 1860. Whether this was to happen, would
depend upon the ability of the Democratic party to avoid a rupture
into factions that would themselves be representatives of
irreconcilable dogmas on the subject of slavery in the Territories.
Hence it is that Mr. Buchanan’s course as President, for the three
first years of his term, is to be judged, with reference to the
responsibility that was upon him to so conduct the Government as to
disarm, if possible, the antagonism of section to section. His
administration of affairs after the election of Mr. Lincoln is to be
judged simply by his duty as the Executive, in the most
extraordinary and anomalous crisis in which the country had ever
been placed.
I take from the multitude of private letters written or received
during and after the election, a few of the most interesting:—
[FROM THE HON. JAMES MACGREGOR.]
HOUSE OF COMMONS, June 20, 1856.
MY DEAR SIR:—
I am, indeed, very happy to receive to-day the decision with
regard to you at Cincinnati, and God grant the result be as
successful as I wish. The feeling in this house, and I am sure in
the country, is, I believe firmly, such as you could wish. I wish
that miserable dispute about Central America were dissipated; for
my part, I believe that if not only Central America, but all
Spanish America, south of California, were possessed and governed
by an Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American race, the more would the
progress of civilization, the progress of industry and commerce,
and the happiness of mankind be advanced.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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