d though I had not far to go went
straight into the Douglas camp.

Taking nearly sixty years to think it over I have reached the conclusion
that Mr. Buchanan was the victim of both personal and historic
injustice. With secession in sight his one aim was to get out of
the White House before the scrap began. He was of course on terms of
intimacy with all the secession leaders, especially Mr. Slidell,
of Louisiana, like himself a Northerner by birth, and Mr. Mason, a
thick-skulled, ruffle-shirted Virginian. It was not in him or in Mr.
Pierce, with their antecedents and associations, to be uncompromising
Federalists. There was no clear law to go on. Moderate men were in a
muck of doubt just what to do. With Horace Greeley Mr. Buchanan was
ready to say "Let the erring sisters go." This indeed was the extent of
Mr. Pierce's pacifism during the War of Sections.

A new party risen upon the remains of the Whig Party--the Republican
Party--was at the door and coming into power. Lifelong pro-slavery
Democrats could not look on with equanimity, still less with
complaisance, and doubtless Pierce and Buchanan to the end of their
days thought less of the Republicans than of the Confederates. As a
consequence Republican writers have given quarter to neither of them.

It will not do to go too deeply into the account of those days. The
times were out of joint. I knew of two Confederate generals who first
tried for commissions in the Union Army; gallant and good fellows
too; but they are both dead and their secret shall die with me. I knew
likewise a famous Union general who was about to resign his commission
in the army to go with the South but was prevented by his wife,
a Northern woman, who had obtained of Mr. Lincoln a brigadier's
commission.

V

In 1858 a wonderful affair came to pass. It was Mrs. Senator Gwin's
fancy dress ball, written of, talked of, far and wide. I did not get to
attend this. My costume was prepared--a Spanish cavalier, Mrs. Casneau's
doing--when I fell ill and had with bitter disappointment to read about
it next day in the papers. I was living at Willard's Hotel, and one of
my volunteer nurses was Mrs. Daniel E. Sickles, a pretty young thing who
was soon to become the victim of a murder and world scandal. Her
husband was a member of the House from New York, and during his
frequent absences I used to take her to dinner. Mr. Sickles had been Mr.
Buchanan's Secretary of Legation in London, and both she a