Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. II.djvu/302

 242 LIVES OF THE PRESIDENTS restoration of the union. His health was generally good throughout his whole life. After his final return to Wheatland he began to be attacked occa sionally by rheumatic gout, and this malady at last terminated his life in his seventy-eighth year. His remains were interred in a cemetery near Lan caster. No man was ever treated with greater in justice than he was during the last seven years of his life by a large part of the public. Men said he was a secessionist; he was a traitor; he had given away the authority of the government; he had been weak and vacillating; he had shut his eyes when men about him, the very ministers of his cabinet, were plotting the destruction of the union; he was old and timid; he might have crushed an incipi ent rebellion, and he had encouraged it. But he bore all this with patience and dignity, forbearing to say anything against the new administration, and confident that posterity would acknowledge that he had done his duty. In 1862 he was attacked by Gen. Scott, who made several statements concerning the president s man agement of the Fort Sumter affairs during the last winter of his administration, which Mr. Buchanan successfully refuted. Mr. Buchanan s loyalty to the constitution of the United States was un bounded. He was not a man of brilliant genius, nor did he ever do any one thing to make his name illustrious and immortal, as Webster did when he