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432 was sent by President Pierce as minister to England this claim was still maintained.

On the accession of the whig party to power under Taylor, in March, 1849, Mr. Buchanan retired for a time from official life. His home, from the age of eighteen, had been the city of Lancaster, where he owned a house. In the autumn of 1848 he purchased a small estate of twenty-two acres, known as Wheatland, about a mile from the town. The house was a substantial brick mansion, and, on Mr. Buchanan's retirement from the cabinet, this became his permanent abode when he was not occupying an official residence in London or in Washington. Mr. Buchanan never married. The death of the lady whom he had intended to marry was a deep and lasting sorrow. The loss of his sister, Mrs. Lane, in 1839, and of her husband two years later, gave him the care of their four children; and the youngest of these, afterward widely known as Miss Harriet Lane, became an inmate of his household. James Buchanan Henry, the son of another sister, who died about the same time, was also taken into his family; and these two cousins were brought up by their uncle with the most wise and affectionate care. Mr. Buchanan's letters to his niece, begun when she was a school-girl, and, after Miss Lane had grown up, written almost daily during her absences from him, give a charming picture of his private life. During the few years of Mr. Buchanan's unofficial life, passed chiefly

at Wheatland, he does not appear to have devoted much time to the law. His correspondence was large; and this, with a constant and lively interest in public affairs, rendered him, even in retirement, very busy. He lent considerable influence to his party as a private individual; but his exertions were not marked by purely partisan feeling. He strenuously opposed the Wilmot proviso, which aimed at excluding slavery from all newly acquired territory; and favored Mr. Clay's &ldquo;Compromise Measures of 1850,&rdquo; which provided for the admission of California as a free state, and the abolition of the slave-trade in the District of Columbia; but, by the fugitive slave law, secured the return to their owners of slaves that had escaped into free states. He wrote many influential public letters, in one of which he declared that &ldquo;two things are necessary to preserve the union from danger: 1. Agitation in the north on the subject of southern slavery must be rebuked and put down by a strong and enlightened public opinion; 2. The fugitive slave law must be enforced in its spirit.&rdquo; In the presidential election of 1852 Mr. Buchanan was a candidate for the democratic nomination; but Gen. Franklin Pierce received the nomination and was elected. The most important service rendered by Mr. Buchanan to his party in this election &mdash; and with him a service to his party was alike a service to his country &mdash; was a

speech made at Greensburgh, Pa., in October, 1852, in opposition to the election of Gen. Scott, the whig candidate. This speech exhibited in a very clear light the whole political history of that period, and asserted a principle which he said ought to be an article of democratic faith: &ldquo;Beware of elevating to the highest civil trust the commander of your victorious armies,&rdquo; drawing a distinction between one &ldquo;who had been a man of war, and nothing but a man of war from his youth upward,&rdquo; and such as had been &ldquo;soldiers only in the day and hour of danger, when the country had demanded their services, and who had already illustrated high civil appointments&rdquo;; and then criticising exhaustively each of Gen. Scott's avowed political opinions, and quoting Mr. Thurlow Weed, &ldquo;one of Gen. Scott's most able supporters,&rdquo; as acknowledging that &ldquo;there was weakness in all Scott said or did about the presidency.&rdquo; When in 1853 Franklin Pierce, became president, he appointed Mr. Buchanan minister to England. Buchanan, though social in his nature, was a man of simple republican tastes, and the formality and etiquette of life at a foreign court, never agreeable, now, at the age of sixty-two, appeared to him particularly distasteful; besides, he considered that his duty to his young relatives as well as to his only surviving brother, a clergyman in delicate health, required his presence at home. But with Mr. Buchanan duty to his country always outweighed every other consideration, and Mr. Pierce's urgent appeal to him to accept what was at that time a very important mission, at length prevailed. Mr. Buchanan sailed for England from New York on 5 Aug., 1853, and landed in Liverpool on the 17th. There were three important questions to be settled with England at this time: the first related to the fisheries; the second was the desire of England to establish reciprocal free trade in certain enumerated articles between the United States and the British North American provinces, and thus preserve their allegiance and ward off the danger of their annexation to the United States; and this Mr. Buchanan was very desirous to use as a powerful lever to secure the third point, which the United States earnestly desired, viz., the withdrawal of all British dominion in Central America, and the recognition of the Monroe doctrine, which the Clayton-Bulwer treaty had not firmly established. President Pierce considered it best that the reciprocity and fishery questions should be settled at Washington; but Mr. Buchanan was intrusted with the negotiation of the Central American question in London. Mr. Buchanan's main object was to develop and ascertain the precise differences between the two governments in regard to the construction of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, but the Crimean war so long delayed the negotiations with this country that nothing could be accomplished while he remained in England. As the war approached, and when it was finally declared, the principles of neutrality, privateering, and many other topics came within the range of the discussion; and it was very much in consequence of the views expressed by Mr. Buchanan to Lord Clarendon, and by the latter communicated to the British cabinet, that the course of England toward neutrals during that war became what it was. When Lord Clarendon, in 1854, presented to Mr. Buchanan a projet for a treaty between Great Britain, France, and the United States, making it piracy for neutrals to serve on board of privateers cruising against the commerce of either of the three nations when such nation was a belligerent, the very impressive reasons that Mr. Buchanan opposed to it caused it to be abandoned. An American