THE LIFE AND PUBLIC SERVICES OF JAMES BUCHANAN. LATE MINISTER TO ENGLAND AND FORMERLY MINISTER TO RUSSIA, AND SECRETARY OF STATE: INCLUDING THE MOST IMPORTANT OF HIS STATE PAPERS, BY R. G. HORTON. With an Accurate Portrait on Steel. NEW YORK: DERBY & JACKSON, 119 NASSAU STREET. CINCINNATI:-H. W. DERBY & 00. 1856. 210. i.227. In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York. W. H. TINSON, Stereotyper. GEORGE RUSSELL & Co., Printers, PREFACE. THE history of the statesmen of America is one of the most interesting and instructive studies that can well employ the mind of a citizen of this free and favored land. While nearly every other country presents, as far as political progress is concerned, little more than the dead calm of despotism, our own land, under the glorious principles of its free Constitution, has given every opportunity for that natural conflict between truth and error, which seems to be the established system of the moral universe, and the only means to insure the progress of wise and benificent reforms. Such a state of society has, we may say, almost created "a new heaven and a new earth," and though its convulsions are regarded with amazement by foreign nations, yet we may reasonably suppose, it is because they are comparatively strangers to the travail and pains necessary to the birth and establishment of new ideas. The prominent part which Democratic statesmen have acted in |