The proclamation of General Jackson, the passage of Mr. Clay’s Compromise Tariff Bill, and the passage of the Force Bill, put an end to any actual collision between the State and the Federal authorities. How different was the state of the country in 1860, before the election of Mr. Lincoln! A generation of men had grown up in the South, many of whom held the supposed right of State secession from the Union as a cardinal feature of their political and constitutional creed. The sole ground for any apprehension of a practical assertion of this doctrine was the contingent election of a President nominated upon a “platform” obnoxious to the people of the slaveholding States. In such a state of affairs, was it for a President, whose administration was to expire in five months, to adopt the foregone conclusion that the Republican candidate would be elected, and to add to this the further conclusion that his election would be followed by a secession of States, which the people of the North would take no conciliatory steps to prevent after the Republican candidate had been elected? Was President Buchanan to throw a military force into the Southern forts, even if he had had a sufficient force within his reach, and thus to proclaim to the whole people of the South, the loyal and the disloyal, that in his judgment there would be but one issue out of the election of Mr. Lincoln—an issue of physical force between the two sections of the country? In what condition would this have placed his successor, and the great political party which was aiming to obtain for that successor the control of the Government? Surely Mr. Lincoln and his political supporters would have had the gravest reason to complain, if Mr. Buchanan, before the election, had, by any act of his own not palpably and imperatively necessary, caused it to be believed by the whole Southern people that there was and could be no alternative but to put their anticipated dangers, their alleged grievances, and the doctrine of secession along with them, at once to the arbitrament of the sword. We have it on Mr. Buchanan’s own solemn assertion, the sincerity of which there can be no reason to doubt, that he considered it his highest duty so to shape his official course during the remainder of his term, as to afford to the secessionists of the South no excuse for renouncing their allegiance to the Federal Union, and to hand the government over to his successor, whoever he might be, without doing a single act that would tend to close the door of reconciliation between the two sections of the country, then unfortunately divided by the political circumstances of the pending election. This was the keynote of his policy, formed before the election of Mr. Lincoln, and steadily followed through every vicissitude, and every changing aspect of the great drama enacting before his eyes. It is easy to reason backward from what occurred, and to say that he should have garrisoned the Southern