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NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 1883
Copyright, 1883, by GEORGE TICKNOR CURTIS.
Notwithstanding the proverbial tendency of biographers to contract what Macaulay has called “the disease of admiration,” no one who can lay claim to any strength of mind need allow the fear of such an imputation to prevent him from doing justice to a public man whose life, for whatever reason, he has undertaken to write. But that my readers may judge of the degree of my exposure to this malady, a frank explanation of the circumstances under which I came to write this work is due both to them and to myself.
In the summer of 1880, the executors and the nearest surviving relatives of Mr. Buchanan asked me to allow them to place in my hands the whole collection of his private papers, with a view to the preparation of a biographical and historical work concerning his public and private life. This duty could not have been undertaken by me, without an explicit understanding that I was to treat the subject in an entirely independent and impartial spirit. To be of much value, the work, as I conceived, must necessarily be, to some extent, a history of the times in which Mr. Buchanan acted an important part as a public man. Moreover, although I had been for far the greater part of this period an attentive observer of public affairs, I had no special interest in Mr. Buchanan’s fame, and was never personally known to him. I could have no object, therefore, of any kind, to subserve, save the truth of history; nor did the representatives of Mr. Buchanan desire me, in assuming the office of his biographer, to undertake that of an official eulogist. I have sought for information, aside from the papers of the late President, in many quarters where I knew that I could obtain it; but the opinions, inferences and conclusions contained in these volumes are exclusively my own, excepting in the few instances in which I have expressly quoted those of other persons. No one has exercised or endeavored to exercise the slightest influence over what I have said of Mr. Buchanan, and I acknowledge and have felt no loyalty to his reputation beyond the loyalty that every man owes to justice and to truth.