Memories of the Ford Administration Read Online Free PDF

and a number of other patriotic designs, a precious copy, bound in faded black, of the 835-page report of the Covode Investigation, printed and widely distributed as anti-Buchanan propaganda in 1860, by the House of Representatives; pre–Civil War histories by Allan Nevins, Roy Franklin Nichols, Avery Craven, Bruce Catton, and Kenneth M. Stampp; biographies in aggressive modern jackets of such figures as Stephen Douglas, Buchanan’s
bête noire
, and John Slidell, his é
minence grise;
pamphlets and booklets concerning Wheatland and old Lancaster; bushels, in liquor boxes deprived of their dividers, of notes upon which indecipherability was growing like a species of moss; and in several boxes emptied of clean typing paper my often-commenced, ever-ramifying, and never-completed book. Itwas not exactly a biography (Klein had done that definitively, though I had often wished that he, with his unique accumulation of information, had elected to write
the more extensive work
his preface tells us he had originally intended) but a tracing of a design, a transaction, the curious long wrestle between God and Buchanan, who, burned early in life by a flare of violence, devoted his whole cunning and assiduous career thereafter to avoiding further heat, and yet was burned at the end, as the Union exploded under him. The gods are bigger than we are, was to be the moral. They kill us for their sport.
    My book began with Buchanan’s pious and fearful upbringing in a log cabin, at a trading post, Stony Batter, in the mountainous middle of Pennsylvania, so lonely a spot that his mother, legend went, hung a bell about the child’s neck lest he wander too far into the forest and become lost. Down from that wooded fastness—
a wild and gloomy gorge
, Klein poetically puts it,
hemmed in on all but the eastern side by towering hills and now far removed from any center of commercial activity
—the family, enlarged by the arrival, after Jamie in 1791, of five girls, descended to civilization, to a farm in the little town, solidly Scotch Presbyterian, of Mercersburg. The future President’s father, also called James, was locally considered a hard man, who gave credit at the store he kept but never extended it. “
The more you know of mankind
,”
he would say
, Klein says, “
the more you will distrust them
.” A big grim businessman, like Kafka’s father—a sheltering insensitive mountain of a father. The boy’s mother,
née
Elizabeth Speer, was, like many a mother in the biography of a successful man, sensitive, spiritual, fond of poetry. She could recite
with ease
, her son wrote in an autobiographical sketch,
passages from Milton, Pope, Young, Cowper, and Thomson
. Klein writes, on unstated authority,
Her ambition was to get to Heaven; her life a quiet acceptanceof every event
. She was young James’s first tutor; then he attended, at the age of six, the Old Stone Academy in Mercersburg. Mercersburg’s Presbyterian pastor, Dr. John King, of whom Buchanan was later to write he had
never known any human being for whom
[he]
felt greater reverence
, urged that the boy be sent, at the age of sixteen, to Dickinson College, in Carlisle, though James Buchanan, Sr., claimed to need his eldest’s help in the store and on the farm. Mother hoped that Jamie would enter the ministry but Father advocated preparation for the law.
    Buchanan entered Dickinson’s junior class in 1807, with nineteen others. (How sweetly the smallness of the numbers speaks for the youth of our nation, a mere Atlantic apron of cultivation and settlement upon the immense land the coming century would see plundered!) The college was struggling,
in a wretched condition
, Buchanan confided to his self-sketch;
and I have often since 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.