Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

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. 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 to save 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 the comforting 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 the future, not yet history. Lancaster, with six thousand inhabitants, considered itself a metropolis, the biggest inland city in the United States. The nation’s first turnpike, a gravelled, stump-free road from Lancaster to Philadelphia, had been opened by its private promoters the year Buchanan was born — born at a western stage of the Great Wagon Road which the turnpike improved and replaced. Eighteen years later, he arrived in Lancaster to learn the law. I determined that if severe application would make me a good lawyer, I should not fail in this particular; and I can say, with truth, that I have never known a harder student than I was at that period of my life. I studied law, and nothing but law, or what was essentially connected with it. I took pains to understand thoroughly, as far as I was capable, everything which I read; and in order to fix it upon my memory and give myself the habit of extempore speaking, I almost every evening took a lonely walk and embodied the ideas which I had acquired during the day in my own language .

A lonely walk. A bell about his neck in the forest. An Elysian landscape wherein one could declaim aloud to oneself and not be heard. When Hopkins’ preceptorship ended early in 1812, and Buchanan turned twenty-one, he went west, against his father’s advice, by horseback, to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to investigate a tract of land to which his father had a partial, disputed title. Had he stayed, would he have become a Clay, a Lincoln? Possibly, that summer, he encountered Thomas Lincoln, who, according to Klein (Buchanan’s autobiography says nothing of this excursion), lived near Elizabethtown and was on the court docket for some land-title cases at this time . Lincoln might very well have had in tow his three-year-old son, Abraham. When he himself was three, Buchanan very likely saw George Washington passing through Cove Gap on his way to squelch the Whiskey Rebellion. From President Washington to President Lincoln in one patriotic lifetime. The Elizabethtown land case had been in litigation since 1803, and Kentucky already had plenty of lawyers. Years later, Ben Hardin recalled Buchanan’s telling him I went there full of the big impression I was to make — and whom do you suppose I met? There was Henry Clay! John Pope, John Allan, John Rowan, Felix Grundy — why, sir, they were giants, and I was only a pigmy. Next day I packed my trunk and came back to Lancaster — that was big enough for me .

He was admitted to the Lancaster bar on November 17, 1812. He hung out his shingle on East King Street, advertising himself in the papers on February 20, 1813, as being available two doors above Mr. Dutchman’s Inn, and nearly opposite to the Farmers Bank . He was appointed, young as he was, prosecutor for Lebanon County, eliciting a letter from his overbearing father advising him to show compassion & humanity for the poor creatures against whom you may be engaged . In 1813 he made $938. In 1814 he made $1,096. He and the town’s jovial 400-pound prothonotary, John Passmore , bought the office building on East King Street, which included a tavern. Four hundred pounds: another giant. Giants were common in that miniature America — a trick of scale, perhaps. After Jackson, an irascible giant, they thinned out. Polk was “Little Hickory.” Douglas was “The Little Giant.” Lincoln obtained giant-hood but by taking giant woes upon himself; it was a gigantism of suffering, reinforced by chronic constipation, depression, and fits of noble prose. Buchanan was six feet tall, a goodly size but in human scale. In 1814, at a Fourth of July barbecue, he gave a rousing speech denouncing Madison’s bungling of the current war against the British. James Madison was a true giant, but physically too small for the fact to be universally recognized. Buchanan was the president of the local Washington Association, an organization for young Federalists; Madison was, of course, a Democratic-Republican, of the awkwardly named opposition party born of Jefferson’s resistance to what he felt were monarchical, unduly centralist, anti-democratic, anti-republican, and anti-French tendencies in the Washington Administration. Democratic-Republicans would rather make war on Great Britain than on Napoleon. The Federalists nominated Buchanan for state Assemblyman. The day after his nomination news arrived that the British had burned Washington. The young office-seeker’s first campaign duty, then, was to volunteer in the general mobilization and march to the defense of Baltimore. His company, calling itself the “Lancaster County Dragoons,” was beseeched for volunteers for a secret mission; he volunteered, and their secret mission proved to be not fighting the British but stealing sixty horses from the residents of the countryside, always preferring to take them from Quakers , says Klein, not citing his source. The lowly mission was accomplished; the British withdrew from Baltimore, having inspired the lyrics for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The dragoons were disbanded; Buchanan came home and was elected Assemblyman. In Lancaster the Federalists always won but their fortunes, sagging lately, were restored by anti-war sentiments. Buchanan’s full-of-advice father wrote him: Perhaps your going to the Legislature may be to your advantage & it may be otherwise . If his father had been less advisory, would Buchanan have been a stronger man, leaning less on others? Would he have been less secretive? He hid his thoughts from even his Cabinet, it was said of his time in the White House. Parents do pry. Our first lies are to them. Buchanan did his duties in Harrisburg. A tall, broad-shouldered young man with wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and fine features (Klein), he gave his maiden speech on February 1, 1815, against conscription and Philadelphia’s privileged set, championing the West against the East and the poor against the rich. He was told he should become a Democrat. A friendly Democrat, William Beale, state Senator from Mifflin County, called upon me, and urged me strongly during this session to change my party name, and be called a Democrat, stating that I would have no occasion to change my principles. In that event, he said he would venture to predict that, should I live, I would become President of the United States . To demonstrate his Federalism Buchanan gave another Fourth of July speech in Lancaster, attacking the Democrats as demagogues and factionaries and friends of the French , possessed by blackest ingratitude and diabolic passions . He got re-elected but the speech created an enmity among the Jeffersonians that lasted all his political life. Even his rabidly pro-Federalist father thought his attack was too severe , and Buchanan allowed, There are many sentiments in this oration which I regret , but goes on in his memoir to quote cherished bits, such as this of the citizens aroused by the British invasion: They rushed upon their enemies with a hallowed fury which the hireling soldiers of Britain could never feel. They taught our foe that the soil of freedom would always be the grave of its invaders .