Memories of the Ford Administration Read Online Free PDF Page B

Without much natural tendency to become dissipated, and chiefly from the example of others, and in order to be considered a clever and spirited youth, I engaged in every sort of extravagance and mischief in which the greatest
[illegible]
of the college indulged
. On a Sunday morning in September, before James was to return for his senior year, a letter arrived which his father opened and, without a word, passed on to him; it was from Dr. Davidson, the principal of Dickinson, saying that, but
for the respect which the faculty entertained for my father, I would have been expelled from college on account of disorderly conduct. That they had borne with me as best they could until that period; but that they would not receive me again, and that the letter was written tosave him the mortification of sending me back and having me rejected
. The mortification! The shame! The kindly Dr. King, a Dickinson trustee, intervened, giving James
a gentle lecture—the more efficient on that account
[—] and pledging himself to Dr. Davidson on the young man’s behalf; Buchanan was accepted back for his senior year, and graduated in 1809.
    The boy and the college, however, still had difficulties.
At the public examination, previous to the commencement, I answered every question without difficulty which was propounded to me
. He thought he deserved highest honors; the Dickinson faculty, however, awarded him none,
assigning as a reason for rejecting my claims that it would have a bad tendency to confer an honor of the college upon a student who had shewn so little respect as I had done for the rules of the college and for the professors. I have scarcely ever been so much mortified at any occurrence of my life as at this disappointment
.
    Dare we dawdle a moment longer by the embers of Buchanan’s formative years, as rather delectably recalled by himself? An especially intimate and lively passage attempts to animate his relation with his mother.
For her sons
, he wrote in retrospect (probably well before 1828, for though the sketch ends there, it exists in several installments and tones, including an off-putting leap into the third person),
as they successively grew up, she was a delightful and instructive companion. She would argue with them, and often gain the victory; ridicule them in any folly or eccentricity; excite their ambition, by presenting to them in glowing colors men who had been useful to their country or their kind, as objects of imitation, and enter into all their joys and sorrows
. More intimately still:
I have often myself, during the vacations at school and college, sat down in the kitchen and whilst she was at the wash tub, entirely from choice, have spent hours pleasantly and instructively conversing with her
. We sniff here thecomforting pungence of lye and the invigorating tang of heterosexual debate. What woman henceforth will entertain, ridicule, inspire, empathize as this one did? Is it not the biological cruelty of mothers to leave, so to speak, too big a hole? Buchanan all his life was to manifest conspicuous pleasure in the company of women, bantering with Southern politicians’ witty wives right to the moment of secession. And his loyalty to his Southern advisers, long after their advice had become duplicitous, has a flavor of the Dickinson episode—a wish
to be considered a clever and spirited youth
, one of the guys. The wish to be liked, the wish to be great: they can co-exist in one heart, but do not inevitably harmonize. Anti-oedipally, he left college
feeling but little attachment towards the Alma Mater
.
    He apprenticed in law to James Hopkins, of Lancaster. Thus he came east; he crossed the Susquehanna, by ferry. There would soon be a bridge, between Columbia and Wrightsville; a lawsuit involving its financing in the wake of the Panic of 1819 would distract him from his courtship of Ann Coleman, and its burning in 1863 possibly saved his house from being razed by Lee’s army. But these contingencies are in