When officially informed of his nomination by a committee, Mr. Buchanan, on the 16th of June (1856), made this simple and straightforward answer:

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communication of the 13th inst., informing me officially of my nomination by the Democratic National Convention, recently held at Cincinnati, as a candidate for the office of President of the United States. I shall not attempt to express the grateful feelings which I entertain towards my Democratic fellow-citizens for having deemed me worthy of this-the highest political honor on earth-an honor such as no other people have the power to bestow. Deeply sensible of the vast and varied responsibility attached to the station, especially at the present crisis in our affairs, I have carefully refrained from seeking the nomination, either by word or by deed. Now that it has been offered by the Democratic party, I accept it with diffidence in my own abilities, but with an humble trust that, in the event of my election, Divine Providence may enable me to discharge my duty in such a manner as to allay domestic strife, preserve peace and friendship with foreign nations, and promote the best interests of the Republic.

In accepting the nomination, I need scarcely say that I accept, in the same spirit, the resolutions constituting the platform of principles erected by the convention. To this platform I intend to conform myself throughout the canvass, believing that I have no right, as the candidate of the Democratic party, by answering interrogatories, to present new and different issues before the people.

In all Presidential elections which have occurred for the past fifty years, the State election in Pennsylvania, occurring in the autumn before the election of a President, has been regarded as of great importance. The Republican party was now in the field, with General Fremont as its candidate, and with the advantage which it had derived in all the free States from the consequences of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the

Louisiana. He died at Cowes in England in 1871. His pure personal character, his indomitable and coercive will, his undoubted courage, and his cool and deliberate good sense gave him a high place among the advisers of the Confederate cause from its earliest organization to its final collapse.

"One of his most striking characteristics, for which he was noted through life, was his unswerving fidelity to his political friends. From the lowest in the ranks to those of the highest station, who were his allies and advocates, not one was forgotten when political victory was secured, and no complaint was ever justly made against him for forgetfulness of those through whom his own political career was established, or to whom, through his influence, the success of his political friends was achieved.

"With strangers Mr. Slidell's manners were reserved, and at times even haughty, but to those who were admitted to the privacy of his domestic life, or who once gained his confdence in politics, he was most genial, gracious, and engaging."

passage of the so-called "Kansas-Nebraska Act," which had been followed in Kansas by an internecine contest between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers. A brutal personal assault upon Senator Sumner, of Massachusetts, by a rash and foolish Southerner, had added fuel to the already kindled sectional flame of Northern feeling. The precise political issue between the Democratic and Republican parties, so far as it related to slavery, concerned of course slavery in the Territories. It was apparent that if the Republicans should gain the State of Pennsylvania in the State election of October, there was a very strong probability, rather a moral certainty, that the electoral votes of all the free States in the Presidential election would be obtained by that party, while there was no probability that it would prevail in a single slave-holding State. The political issue, therefore, was whether the sectional division of the free and the slave States in the election of a President was to come then, or whether it was to be averted. The State election in Pennsylvania, in October, turned in favor of the Democrats. Her twenty-seven electoral votes were thus morally certain to be given to Mr. Buchanan in the Presidential election. In the interval, a large body of his friends and neighbors assembled at Wheatland, and called him out. His remarks, never before printed, are now extant in his handwriting. He said:

MY FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS :-
:-

I am glad to see you and to receive and reciprocate your congratulations upon the triumph of the Democrats in Pennsylvania and Indiana.

It is my sober and solemn conviction that Mr. Fillmore uttered the words of soberness and truth when he declared that if the Northern sectional party should succeed, it would lead inevitably to the destruction of this beautiful fabric reared by our forefathers, cemented by their blood, and bequeathed to us as a priceless inheritance.

The people of the North seem to have forgotten the warning of the Father of his Country against geographical parties. And by far the most dangerous of all such parties is that of a combined North against a combined South on the question of slavery. This is no mere political question-no question addressing itself to the material interests of men. It rises far higher. With the South it is a question of self-preservation, of personal security around the family altar, of life or of death. The Southern people still cherish a love for the Union; but what to them is even our blessed confederacy, the wisest and the best form of government ever devised by man, if they cannot enjoy its

blessings and its benefits without being in constant alarm for their wives and children.

The storm of abolition against the South has been gathering for almost a quarter of a century. It had been increasing by every various form of agitation which fanaticism could devise. We had reached the crisis. The danger was imminent. Republicanism was sweeping over the North like a tornado. It appeared to be resistless in its course. The blessed Union of these Statesthe last hope for human liberty on earth- appeared to be tottering on its base. Had Pennsylvania yielded, had she become an abolition State, without a special interposition of Divine Providence, we should have been precipitated into the yawning gulf of dissolution. But she stood erect and firm as her own Alleghanies. She breasted the storm and drove it back. The night is departing, and the roscate and propitious morn now breaking upon us promises a long day of peace and prosperity for our country. To secure this, all we of the North have to do is to permit our Southern neighbors to manage their own domestic affairs, as they permit us to manage ours. It is merely to adopt the golden rule, and do unto them as we would they should do unto us, in the like circumstances. All they ask from us is simply to let them alone. This is the whole spirit and essence of the much abused Cincinnati platform. This does no more than adopt the doctrine which is the very root of all our institutions, and recognize the right of a majority of the people of a Territory, when about to enter the Union as a State, to decide for themselves whether domestic slavery shall or shall not exist among them. This is not to favor the extension of slavery, but simply to deny the right of an abolitionist in Massachusetts or Vermont to prescribe to the people of Kansas what they shall or shall not do in regard to this question.

Who contests the principle that the will of the majority shall govern? What genuine republican of any party can deny this? The opposition have never met this question fairly. Within a brief period, the people of this country will condemn their own folly for suffering the assertion of so plain and elementary a principle of all popular governments to have endangered our blessed Constitution and Union, which owe their origin to this very principle.

I congratulate you, my friends and neighbors, that peace has been restored to Kansas. As a Pennsylvanian I rejoice that this good work has been accomplished by two sons of our good old mother State, God bless her! We have reason to be proud of Colonel Geary and General Smith. We shall hear no more of bleeding Kansas. There will be no more shrieks for her unhappy destiny. The people of this fine country, protected from external violence and internal commotion, will decide the question of slavery for themselves, and then slide gracefully into the Union and become one of the sisters in our great Confederacy.

Indeed, viewed in the eye of sober reason, this Kansas question is one of the most absurd of all the Proteus-like forms which abolition fanaticism has ever assumed to divide and distract the country. And why do I say this? Kansas might enter the Union with a free constitution to-day, and once

admitted, no human power known to the Constitution could prevent her from establishing slavery to-morrow. No free-soiler has ever even contended that she would not possess this power.

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 slaveholding 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:

MY DEAR SIR:

[FROM THE HON. JAMES MACGREGOR.]

HOUSE OF COMMONS, June 20, 1856.

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.

I went over to Paris a few days after you left for Havre. Saw much of Mr. Mason, Mr. Corbin and Mr. Childs. The latter drew me a most able statement relative to the disputes with America, which I made good use of, on my return, with Lord Palmerston.

You will observe that even the meretricious Times, which I send you a copy of, is coming to be more reasonable; although I cannot trust that journal, which, I believe, was truly characterized by O'Connell, in the House of Commons, as representing "the sagacity of the rat and the morality of a harlot." I write in great haste for the post; but believe me always, and with my very kindest regards to Miss Lane, Faithfully yours,

J. MACGREGOR.

[TO WILLIAM B. REED, ESQ.]

Monday Morning, July 7, 1856.

MY DEAR SIR:

I return Mr. Stevenson's letter with thanks. He appears to be " a marvellous proper man.' There never was a more unfounded falsehood than that of my connection with the bargain, or alleged bargain. At the time I was a young member of Congress, not on terms of intimacy with either Jackson or Clay. It is true I admired both, and wished to see the one President and the other Secretary of State; and after Mr. Clay had been instructed by the Kentucky legislature to vote for Jackson, I believed my wish would be accomplished. It must have been then that I had the conversation with Mr. Clay, in Letcher's room, to which Colton refers, for I declare I have not the least trace on my memory of any such conversation. Had I known anything of the previous history of Jackson and Clay, I could not have believed it possible that the former would appoint the latter Secretary. A conversation